THE NEW JERUSALEM
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
PREFACE
This book is only an uncomfortably large note-book; and it has the disadvantages, whether or no it has the advantages, of notes that were taken 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 even there the book only reverts to the original note-book. A difference of opinion, which divided the writer of the book from the politics of the newspaper, prevented the complete publication of that chapter in that place. I recognise that any expurgated form of it would have falsified the proportions of my attempt to do justice in a very difficult 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 everybody recognises the Jew as something quite distinct from the Englishman or the European; and where his unpopularity even moved me in the direction of his defence. But I admit it was something of a shock to return to a conventional atmosphere, in which that unpopularity is still actually denied or described as mere persecution. It was more of a shock to realise that this most obscurantist of all types of obscurantism is still sometimes regarded as a sort of liberalism. To talk of the Jews always as the oppressed and never as the oppressors is simply absurd; it is as if men pleaded for reasonable help 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 less local colonial development might really transfer the bulk of Israel to a more independent basis, as simply to demand that Jews shall continue to control other nations as well as their own. It might be worth 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 too many mistakes; the historical conjectures, for they can be no more, are founded on authorities sufficiently recognised for me to be permitted to trust them; but I have never pretended to the knowledge necessary to 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 are sensitive about the spelling of words; and the very proof-readers will sometimes revolt and turn Mahomet into Mohammed. Upon this point, however, I am unrepentant; for I never could see the point of altering a form with historic and even heroic fame in our own language, for the sake of reproducing by an arrangement of our letters something that is really written in quite different letters, and probably pronounced with quite a different accent. In speaking of the great prophet I am therefore resolved to call him Mahomet; and am prepared, on further provocation, to call him Mahound.
G. K. C.
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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
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THE NEW JERUSALEM
CHAPTER I
THE WAY OF THE CITIES
It was in the season of Christmas that I came out of my little garden in that “field of the beeches” between the Chilterns and the Thames, and began to walk backwards through history to the place from which Christmas came. For it is often necessary to walk backwards, as a man on 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 name of his destination, and has to go back whence he came, even to find out where 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 mind the true map of the modern wanderings; but whether I shall be able to say anything of what I saw, this story must show.
I had said farewell to all my friends, or all those with my own limited number of legs; and nothing living remained but a dog and a donkey. The reader will learn with surprise that my first feeling of fellowship went out to the dog; I am well aware that I lay open my guard to a lunge of 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 the moment there was rather a moral contrast than a pictorial parallel. For the dog did indeed seem to stand for home and everything I was leaving behind me, with reluctance, especially that season of the year. For one thing, he is named after Mr. Winkle, the Christmas guest of Mr. Wardle; and there is indeed something Dickensian in his union of domesticity with exuberance. He jumped about me, barking like a 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 not their due honour in the East; and this seemed to sharpen my sense of my own domestic sentinel as a sort of symbol of the West. On the other hand, the East is full of donkeys, often very dignified donkeys; and when I turned my attention to the other grotesque 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 up so 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 East after all. The dog’s very lawlessness is but an extravagance of 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 world is full of fantastic forms of animal worship; a religion generally accompanied with human sacrifice. Yet we hear strangely little of the real merits of animals; and one of them surely is this innocence of 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 cannot claim 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 this power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely things that 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 Scripture by 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 man in a day. I wish this fact were more often remembered, in judging whether really poor men have really been cruel to donkeys. But I assure the reader that I am not cruel to my donkey; the cruelty is 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 me that many of us, in just detestation of the dirty trick of cruelty to 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 field every morning; and suppose my secretary always kicked me by way of beginning the day’s work; I wonder whether that day’s work would resume its normal course as if nothing had happened. Nothing graver than these grotesque images and groping speculations would come into my conscious mind just then, though at the back of it there was an indescribable sense of regret and parting. All through my wanderings the dog remained in my memory as a Dickensian and domestic emblem of England; and if it is difficult to 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-woods and the silver cross of the cross-roads. For the four roads that meet in the market-place of my little town make one of the largest and simplest of such outlines on the map of England; and the shape as it shines 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 combination of liberty and limitation which we call choice. A man is entirely free 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 menace of the end of the world, not apocalyptic but astronomical; and the cloud that covered the little town of Beaconsfield might have fitted in with such a fancy. It faded, however, as I left the place further behind; and in London the weather, though wet, was comparatively clear. It was almost as if Beaconsfield had a domestic day of judgment, and an end of the world all to itself. In a sense Beaconsfield has four ends of the world, for its four 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 at once ultimate and infinite. The very title of London End sounds like the other end of nowhere, or (what is worse) of everywhere. It suggests a sort of derisive riddle; where does London End? As I came up through the vast vague suburbs, it was this sense of London as 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 amount of mental and moral fog. The whole industrial world symbolised by London had reached a curious complication and confusion, not easy to parallel in human history. It is not a question of controversies, but rather of cross-purposes. As I went by Charing Cross my eye caught a poster about Labour politics, with something about the threat of Direct Action and a demand for 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 cut across 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 advertised in large letters on the sky cannot plead the shy privileges of privacy. Meanwhile the Labour men talk about the need to “nationalise” the mines or the land, as if it were not the great difficulty in a plutocracy to 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 and state 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 are with the Socialists; in so far that there is something to be said 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 nonsensical a situation as that in which the strikers demand Government control and the Government denounces its own control as anarchy. The mob howls before the palace gates, “Hateful tyrant, we demand that you assume 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 large misunderstanding everywhere; a misunderstanding amounting to a mess. And as this was the last impression that London left on me, so it was the impression I carried with me about the whole modern problem of 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 return to our first principles in philosophy. We must consider how we came to be doing what we do, and even saying what we say. As it is, the very terms we use are either meaningless or something more than meaningless, inconsistent even with themselves. This applies, for instance, to the talk of both sides in 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 at all 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 different from what they say; and even this verbal inconsistency, this mere welter of words, is a sign of the common confusion of thought. It is this sort of thing that made London seem like a limbo of lost words, and possibly of lost wits. And it is here we find the value of what I have called walking backwards through history.
It is one of the rare merits of modern mechanical travel that it enables us to compare widely different cities in rapid succession. The stages of my own progress were the chief cities of separate 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 it was 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 it did really begin to clarify the confusion of names and notions in modern society. I first became conscious of this when I went 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 is supposed to be democratic, or supposed to be trying to be democratic. The ninth century, the time of the Norse invasions, was not saintly in the sense of being filled with saints; it was filled with pirates and petty tyrants, and the first feudal anarchy. But sanctity was 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 dream of the dark age of industrialism; if it be very much of a dream. It is this which prophets promise to achieve, and politicians pretend to achieve, and poets sometimes desire to achieve, and sometimes only desire to desire. In a word, an equal citizenship is quite the reverse of the reality in the modern world; but it is still the 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 la Bastille be indeed the spirit of liberty, it must see a million growths in a modern city to make it wish to fly back again into heaven. But our secular society would not know what goddess to put on the 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 myself where this classic and republican ideal came from, and the answer was equally clear. The place from which it had come was the place to which I was going; Rome. And it was not until I had reached Rome that I adequately realised the next great reality that simplified the 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 brick and stone, that small rock that rose and overshadowed the whole earth; the Capitol. Here in the grey dawn of our history sat the strong Republic that set her foot upon the necks of kings; and it was from here assuredly that the spirit of the Republic flew like an eagle to 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 sometimes called the anarchy of Paris. The expansion of the Roman Empire was accompanied by a sort of permanent Roman Revolution, fully as furious as the French Revolution. So long as the Roman system was really 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 were among them some that further aided the solution of the problem. I saw the larger achievements of the later Romans; and the lesson that 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 and of energy in the British Empire. I saw the Baths of Caracalla, witnessing to a cult of cleanliness, adduced also to prove the luxury of Ancient Romans and the simplicity of Anglo-Saxons. All it really 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 number of people to do the work of the world first, before it allowed more 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 scheme like Socialism. Sometimes very like Socialism.
Only standing idly on one of those grassy mounds under one of those 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 side was right, or what solution was reliable, or any partisan points or 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 a peak 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 Paris without the slavery of Rome. Between the Roman Republic and the French Republic something had happened. Whatever else it was, it was the abandonment of the ancient and fundamental human habit of slavery; the numbering of men for necessary labour as the normal foundation of society, even a society in which citizens were free and equal. When the idea of equal citizenship returned to the world, it found that 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 getting the work of the world done somehow. We have now to assume not only that all citizens are equal, but that all men are citizens. Capitalism attempted it by combining political equality with economic inequality; it assumed the rich could always hire the poor. But Capitalism seems to me to have collapsed; to be not only a discredited ethic but a bankrupt business. Whether we shall return to pagan slavery, or to small property, or by guilds or 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 green mound 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 happened between the rise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the French Republic? Why did the equal citizens of the first take it for granted that there would be slaves? Why did the equal citizens of 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 that when equality returned, it was no longer the equality of citizens, and had to be the equality of men? The answer is that this equality of men is in more senses than one a mystery. It is a mystery which I pondered as I stood in the corridor of the train going south from Rome. It was at daybreak, and (as it happened) before any one else had risen, that I looked out of the long row of windows across a 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 eaves of 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 such a 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 be going due east, as if disappearing into the sun; and save for the noise of 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 marked out 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 was myself only half-awake. It is common in such a case to see some new signal or landmark; but in my experience it is rather the things already 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 name of the magic which had made all those peasants out of pagan slaves, and has presented to the modern world a new problem of labour and liberty. It was as if I already saw against the clouds of 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 worth while to trace it from one blatant and bewildering yellow poster in the London streets to its high places in history. But it is only one example of the way in which a thousand things grouped themselves and fell into perspective as I passed farther and farther 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 too much of a puzzle even to be a problem. For instance, a friend of mine described his book, The Path to Rome, as a journey through all Europe that the Faith had saved; and I might very well describe my own journey as one through all Europe that the War has saved. The trail of the actual fighting, of course, was awfully apparent everywhere; the plantations of pale crosses seemed to crop up on every side like growing things; and the first French villages through which I passed had heard in the distance, day and night, the guns of the long battle-line, like the breaking of an endless exterior sea of night upon the very borderland of the world. I felt it most as we passed the noble towers of Amiens, so near the high-water mark of the high tide of barbarism, in that night of terror just before the turning of the tide. For the truth which thus grew clearer with travel is rightly represented by the metaphor of the artillery, as the thunder and surf of a sea beyond the world. Whatever else the war was, it was like the resistance of something as 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 or vision of it seemed to clarify itself more and more as I went on. It was the defence of that same ancient enclosure in which stood the broken columns of the Roman forum and the column in the Paris square, and of all other such enclosures down to the domestic enclosures 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 West had again proved too strong for the wild dogs of the Orient. For the foes of such creative limits are chaos and old night, whether they are the Northern barbarism that pitted tribal pride and brutal drill against the civic ideal of Paris, or the Eastern barbarism that brought brigands 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 and larger than all the disputed details about the war and the peace. A man may think it extraordinary, as I do, that the natural dissolution of the artificial German Empire into smaller states should have actually been prevented by its enemies, when it was already accepted in despair by its friends. For we are now trying hard to hold the Prussian system together, having hammered hard for four mortal years 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 should clear the Turks out of Turkey, but leave them in Constantinople. For that is driving the barbarians from their own rude tillage and 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 simpler truth will still be there. It was that the weeds and wild things 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 line has been drawn somewhere and a clearance has been made somehow. The ancient plan of our city has been saved; a city at least capable of containing citizens. I felt this in the chance relics of the war itself; I felt it twenty times more in those older relics which even the war had never touched at all; I felt the change as much in the changeless East as in the ever-changing West. I felt it when I crossed another great square in Paris to look at a certain statue, which I had last seen hung with crape and such garlands as we give the dead; but on whose plain pedestal nothing now is left but the single word “Strasbourg.” I felt it when I saw words merely scribbled with a pencil on a wall in a poor street in Brindisi; Italia vittoriosa. But I felt it as much or even more in things infinitely more ancient and remote; in those monuments like mountains that still seem to look down upon all modern things. For these things were more than a trophy that 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 had saved them or at least in what formation they had been saved. I knew that these scattered splendours of antiquity would hardly have 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 turquoise and lapis lazuli, and relieved with marble mountains as clear and famous as marble statues, it was easy to feel all that had been pure and radiant even in the long evening of paganism; but that did not make me forget what strong stars had comforted the inevitable night. The historical moral was the same whether these marble outlines were merely “the isles” seen afar off like sunset 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 was the only thing that would have permanently preserved either. It was but part of the same story when we passed the hoary hills that held the primeval culture of Crete, and remembered that it may well have been the first home of the Philistines. It mattered the less by now whether the pagans were best represented by Poseidon the deity or by Dagon the demon. It mattered the less what gods had blessed the Greeks in their youth and liberty; for I knew what god had blessed them in their despair. I knew by what sign they had survived the long slavery under Ottoman 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 it had ever survived in any sense. Nor did this feeling of our fixed formation 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 men had heard from the lips of Hypatia the last words of Plato. I know the Christians tore Hypatia in pieces; but they did not tear Plato in pieces. The wild men that rode behind Omar the Arab would have thought nothing of tearing every page of Plato in pieces. For it is the nature of all this outer nomadic anarchy that it is capable 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 long history are never lost. As I went forward the vision of our own civilisation, in the form in which it finally found unity, grew clearer and clearer; nor did I ever know it more certainly than when I had left it behind.
For the vision was that of a shape appearing and reappearing among shapeless things; and it was a shape I knew. The imagination was forced to rise into altitudes infinitely ancient and dizzy with distance, as if into the cold colours of primeval dawns, or into the upper strata and dead spaces of a daylight older than the sun and moon. But the character of that central clearance still became clearer and clearer. And my memory turned again homewards; and I thought it was like the vision of a man flying from Northolt, over that little market-place beside my own door; who can see nothing below him but a waste as of grey forests, and the pale pattern of a cross.
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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 an English governing class. Anyhow it is true that the civilisations are stratified in this formation, or superimposed in this order. It is the first impression produced by the darkness and density of the bazaars, the line of the lighted cafes and the blaze of the big hotels. But it contains a much deeper truth in all three cases, and especially in the case of the French influence. It is indeed one of the first examples of what I mean by the divisions of 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 a place like India. In so far as this is true, it is quite equally true that 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 that it 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 French things are not accepted as French. They are accepted as human. However many foreigners played football, they would still consider football an English thing. But they do not consider fencing a 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 rather advanced Anglomania. But when an Englishman calls it an hotel, we feel no special dread of him either as a dangerous foreigner or a dangerous lunatic. We need not recognise less readily the 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 adventure that the adventurer does remain different from the strange tribes or 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 merely appreciate it properly in its place, there can be no doubt about the cause of that capacity. The cause is in the spirit that 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 success of the French Revolution. They have assumed that it claims to be a sort of divine and distant thing, and therefore have not noticed it in the nearest and most materialistic things. They have watched its wavering in the senate and never seen it walking in the streets; though it can be seen in the streets of Cairo as 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 people who 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 they have the detachment of a governing group and even a garrison. They cannot be mistaken for human beings. The people going to a cafe are simply human beings going to it because it is a human place. They have forgotten how much is French and how much Egyptian in their civilisation; they simply think of it as civilisation. Now this character of the older French culture must be grasped because it 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 back to the Roman culture. In this respect the Gauls really continue the work of the Romans, in making something official which comes at last to be regarded as ordinary. And the great fundamental fact which is incessantly forgotten and ought to be incessantly remembered, about these cities and provinces of the near East, is that they were 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 remember the road or to forget it. I am so constituted as to be capable of 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 side along the ways of the world, he being full of a rich and humane sentiment, because he remembers passing that way a few hundred times since his childhood; while to me existence is a perpetual fairy-tale, because I have forgotten all about it. The lamp-post which moves him 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 me as arresting and revolutionary as a barricade. Now in this, I am glad to say, my temperament is very English; and the difference is very typical of the two functions of the English and the French. But in practical politics the French have a certain advantage in knowing where 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 something of a paradox. The real English claim is never heard in England and never uttered by Englishmen. We do indeed hear a number of false English claims, and other English claims that are rather irrelevant than false. We hear pompous and hypocritical suggestions, full of that which so often accompanies the sin of pride, the weakness of provinciality. We hear suggestions that the English alone can establish anywhere a reign of law, justice, mercy, purity and all the rest of it. We also hear franker and fairer suggestions that the English have after all (as indeed they have) embarked on a spirited and stirring adventure; and that there has been a real romance in the extending of the British Empire in strange lands. But the real case for these semi-eastern occupations is not that 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 search for something non-European. It would be much truer to call it putting Europe together again after it had been broken. It may almost be said of the Britons, considered as the most western of Europeans, that they have so completely forgotten their own history that they have forgotten even their own rights. At any rate they have forgotten the claims that could reasonably be made for them, but which they never think of making for themselves. They have not the faintest notion, for instance, of why hundreds of years ago an English saint was taken from Egypt, or why an English king was fighting in Palestine. They merely have a vague idea that George of Cappadocia was naturalised much in the same way as George of Hanover. They almost certainly suppose that Coeur de Lion in his wanderings happened to meet the King of Egypt, as Captain Cook might happen to meet the King of the Cannibal Islands. To understand the past connection of England with the near East, it is necessary to understand something 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 nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilisation in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; as will be apparent later, I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded. An Arabian gentleman found riding on the road to Paris or hammering on the gates of Vienna can hardly complain that we have sought him out in his simple tent in the desert. The conqueror of Sicily and Spain cannot reasonably express surprise at being 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 Saladin but of the spoils of ancient Egyptian architecture; and that fact is 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 set high like a sign in heaven. The sign is also significant because from 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 aloud in triumph when they saw the sea afar off; but it is a stranger experience to see the earth afar off. And few of us, strictly speaking, have ever seen the earth at all. In cultivated countries it is always clad, as it were, in green garments. The first sight of the desert is like the sight of a naked giant in the distance. The image is all the more natural because of the particular formation which 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 seen the 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 line of wrinkled and hollow hills like the scalps of bald men; or worse, of bald women. For it is impossible not to think of such repulsive images, in spite of real sublimity of the call to the imagination. There is something curiously hostile and inhuman about the first appearance of the motionless surges of that dry and dreadful sea. Afterwards, if the traveller has happened to linger here and there in the outposts of the desert, has seen the British camp at Kantara or the graceful French garden town of Ismalia, he comes to take the desert as a background, and sometimes a beautiful background; a mirror of mighty reflections and changing colours almost as strange as 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 make itself into something like a mountain range; and the traveller remembers all the tragedies of the desert, when he lifts up his eyes to 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 relation to men than with what the desert is in itself. When the mind has grown used to its monotony, a curious change takes place which I have 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 ordinary word such as “moon” or “man” about fifty times, he will find that 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. Something of 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 this simplification appears, I think, in the religions of the desert, especially in the religion of Islam. It explains something of the super-human hopes that fill the desert prophets concerning the future; it explains something also about their barbarous indifference to the past.
We think of the desert and its stones as old; but in one sense they are unnaturally new. They are unused, and perhaps unusable. They might be the raw material of a world; only they are so raw as to be rejected. It is not easy to define this quality of something primitive, something not mature enough to be fruitful. Indeed there is a hard simplicity about many Eastern things that is as much crude as archaic. A palm-tree is very like a tree drawn by a child—or by a very futurist artist. Even a pyramid is like a 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 which these 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 sense of novelty, that we can begin to understand both the immensity and 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 it merely 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 simple ideas as if they were entirely new ideas. There is a love of concentration which comes from the lack of comparison. The lonely man looking at the lonely palm-tree does see the elementary truths about 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 drawn by a child, but he is not the child who could draw it. He has not command 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 presence he 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 comes from comparison. The man looking at the palm-tree does realise the simple fact that God made it; while the man looking at the lamp-post in a large modern city can be persuaded by a hundred sophistical circumlocutions that he made it himself. But the man in the desert cannot compare the palm-tree with the lamp-post, or even with all the other trees which may be better worth looking at than the lamp-post. Hence his religion, though true as far as it goes, has not the variety and vitality of the churches that were designed by men walking in the woods and orchards. I speak here of the Moslem type of religion and not of the oriental type of 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 is to a forest full of birds. In short, the man of the desert tends to 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 believes in the existence of God believes in the equality of man. And it has been 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 was like 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 really a man; the proverbial two-legged fowl without feathers. He is an absolute and elementary shape, like the palm-tree or the pyramid. The discoverer does not pause to consider through what gradations he may have been evolved from a camel. When the man is a mere dot in the distance, the other man does not shout at him and ask whether he had a university education, or whether he is quite sure he is purely Teutonic and not Celtic or 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 against a 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 dangerous potentiality of fanaticism of the menace of which something may be said 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 does take his faith as a fact, and not even as a truth in our more transcendental sense. When he does take up a mystical idea he takes it 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 divides the man from the camel. But even then he recognises the equality of men in 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 over the Jew, who is generally so much his intellectual superior; and even in some ways his spiritual superior. The Jew has far more moral 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 something more worthy of the genius of Isaiah and Spinoza. The Moslem Paradise is 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 race that 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 Englishmen and 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 himself unworthy 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 producing a much subtler kind of arrogance in the Jews. From this particular sort of self-deception the more savage man of the desert is free. If he is not considering somebody as a Moslem, he will consider him as a man. At the price of something like barbarism, he has at 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 in the sentiment of sex. Islam asserts admirably the equality of men; but it is the equality of males. No one can deny that a noble dignity is possible even to the poorest, who has seen the Arabs coming in from the desert to the cities of Palestine or Egypt. No one can deny that men whose rags are dropping off their backs can bear themselves in a way befitting kings or prophets in the great stories of Scripture. No one can be surprised that so many fine artists have delighted to draw such models on the spot, and to make realistic studies for illustrations to the Old and New Testaments. On the road to Cairo one may see twenty groups exactly like that of 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 ago that petticoats, which some regard as a garb of humiliation for women are 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 his own family, is the king and the priest and the judge. I do not mean merely that he is the master, as many would say of the male in many Western societies, especially simple and self-governing societies. I mean something more; I mean that he has not only the kingdom and the power but the glory, and even as it were the glamour. I mean he has not only the rough leadership that we often give to the man, but the special sort of social beauty and stateliness that we generally expect only of the woman. What we mean when we say that an ambitious man wants to have a fine woman at the head of the dinner-table, that the Moslem world really means when it expects to see a fine man at the head of the house. Even in the street he 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 exhibits this indefinable character not merely of dignity but of pomp. It can be traced even in the tarbouch, the minimum of Turkish attire worn by all the commercial classes; the thing more commonly called 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-dress of a priest. And it is a hat one cannot take off to a lady.
This fact is familiar enough in talk about Moslem and oriental life generally; but I only repeat it in order to refer it back to the same simplification which is the advantage and disadvantage of 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 delicate balance between the sexes which gives the rarest and most poetic kind of pleasure to those who can strike it. But it is not self-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 sense that all the fame and fun should go to the sex that is stronger and less tied, as that all the authority should go to the parents rather than the children. Pity for weakness he can understand; and the Moslem is quite capable of giving royal alms to a cripple or 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 of the more civilised sentiment. This hard and literal view of life gives no 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 there is courtesy there is comedy. There is no comedy in the desert.
Another quite logical and consistent element, in the very logical and consistent creed we call Mahometanism, is the element that we call Vandalism. Since such few and obvious things alone are vital, and since a half-artistic half-antiquarian affection is not one of these things, and cannot be called obvious, it is largely left out. It is very difficult to say in a few well-chosen words exactly what is now the use of the Pyramids. Therefore Saladin, the great Saracen warrior, simply stripped the 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 to the 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 of the great pagan literature and art. This is not concerned with brutal outbreaks of revenge which may be found on both sides, or with chivalrous caprices 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 Dante said farewell to Virgil when he left him in the limbo of the pagans. The Moslem traditions, unlike the medieval legends, do not suggest the image of a knight who kissed Venus before he killed her. We see in all the Christian ages this combination which is not a compromise, but rather a complexity made by two contrary enthusiasms; as when the Dark Ages copied out the pagan poems while denying the pagan legends; or when the popes of the Renascence imitated the Greek temples while denying the Greek gods. This high inconsistency is inconsistent with Islam. Islam, as I have said, takes everything literally, and does not know how to play with anything. And the cause of the contrast is the historical cause of which we must be conscious in all studies of this kind. The Christian Church had from a very early date the idea of reconstructing a whole civilisation, and even a complex civilisation. It was the attempt to make a new balance, which differed from the old balance of the stoics of Rome; but which could not afford to lose its balance any more than they. It differed because the old system was one of many religions under one government, while the new was one of many governments under one religion. But the idea of variety in unity remained though it was in a sense reversed. A historical instinct made the men of the new Europe try hard to find a place for everything in the system, however much might be denied to the individual. Christians might lose everything, but Christendom, if possible, must not lose anything. The very nature of Islam, even at its best, was quite different from this. Nobody supposed, even subconsciously, that Mahomet meant to restore ancient Babylon as medievalism vaguely sought to restore ancient Rome. Nobody thought that the builders of the Mosque of Omar had looked at the Pyramids as the builders of St. Peter’s might have looked at the Parthenon. Islam began at the beginning; it was content with the 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 movement arising from a very noble mood, but sooner or later it must find its level 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 somewhere one of his perfectly picked phrases for an empty-minded man; that he has not one thought to rub against another while he waits for 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 one thought 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 were a great many things in the creed for which he had no use. He might just as well have said that there were a great many things in the Encyclopedia Britannica for which he had no use. It would probably have occurred to him that the work in question was meant for humanity and not for him. But even in the case of the Encyclopedia, it will often be found a stimulating exercise to read two articles on two widely different subjects and note where they touch. In fact there is really a great deal to be said for the man in Pickwick who read first about China and 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 suffer from 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 thus criticising the Moslem movement will do well to criticise himself and his world at the same time. For in truth most modern things are mere movements in the same sense as the Moslem movement. They are at best fashions, in which one thing is exaggerated because 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 only move 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 sexes by their feminism than the Arabs did by their anti-feminism. A woman can find her home on the hustings even less than in the harem; but such movements do not really attempt to find a final home for anybody or anything. Bolshevism is a movement; and in my opinion a very natural and just movement considered as a revolt against the crude cruelty of Capitalism. But when we find the Bolshevists making 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 having to apply that principle, let us say, to “Charley’s Aunt.” None of these things seek to establish a complete philosophy such as Aquinas founded on Aristotle. The only two modern men who 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 enough man to show how difficult it is to do it in modern times. None of these movements can do anything but move; they have not discovered where to rest.
And this fact brings us back to the man of the desert, who moves and does not rest; but who has many superiorities to the restless races of the industrial city. Men who have been in the Manchester movement in 1860 and the Fabian movement in 1880 cannot sneer at a religious mood that lasted for eight hundred years. And those who tolerate the degraded homelessness of the slums cannot despise the much more dignified homelessness of the desert. Nevertheless, the thing is a homelessness and not a home; and there runs 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 Western sense of recognising the kindred points of heaven and home. Even the exception to this rule is an exception at once terrible and touching. There is one house that the Moslem does build like 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 street of houses, each with a door that might be opened by a dead man. But in a less fanciful sense, there is about it something profoundly pathetic and human. Here indeed is the sailor home from sea, in the only port he will consent to call his home; here at last the nomad confesses the common need of men. But even about this there 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 progress and Catholics call development. There is death and hell in the desert when it does begin over again. There is always the 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 thousands of 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 the repetitions of wide sands and rolling skies. The very phrase is like an everlasting echo, that can never cease to say the same sacred word; and when I saw afterwards the mightiest and most magnificent of all the mosques of that land, I found that its inscriptions had the same character of a deliberate and defiant sameness. The ancient Arabic alphabet and script is itself at once so elegant and so exact that it can be used as a fixed ornament, like the egg and dart pattern or the Greek key. It is as if we could make a 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 Creed is full of vain repetitions; but that is because people are too lazy to listen to it, or not lucid enough to understand it. The same terms are used throughout, as they are in a proposition of Euclid. But the steps are all as differentiated and progressive as in a proposition of Euclid. But in the inscriptions of the Mosque whole sentences seem to occur, not like the steps of an argument, but rather like the chorus of a song. This is the impression everywhere produced by 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 those tremendous plains, brooding upon the soul with all the solemn weight of the self-evident.
There is indeed another aspect of the desert, yet more ancient and momentous, of which I may speak; but here I only deal with its effect on this great religion of simplicity. For it is through 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 memory because of the suddenness with which I escaped from it. I had not expected the contrast; and it may have coloured all my after experiences. I descended from the desert train at Ludd, which had all the look of 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 romantic about its appearance. It was perhaps unusually dreary; for heavy rain had fallen; and the water stood about in what it is easier to 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 I was going; and it wound its way up miry paths to a more rolling stretch of country with patches of cactus here and there. And then with a curious abruptness I became conscious that the 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 I had come home; or rather to that home behind home for which we are all homesick. The lost memory of it is the life at once of faith and of fairy-tale. Groves glowing with oranges rose behind hedges of grotesque cactus or prickly pear; which really looked like green dragons guarding the golden apples of the Hesperides. On each side of the road were such flowers as I had never seen before under the sun; for indeed they seemed to have the sun in them rather than the sun on them. Clusters and crowds of crimson anemones were of a red not to be symbolised in blood or wine; but rather in the red glass that glows in the window dedicated to a martyr. Only in a wild Eastern tale could one picture a pilgrim or traveller finding such a garden in the desert; and I thought of the oldest tale of all and the garden from which we came. But there was something in it yet more subtle; which there must be in the impression of any earthly paradise. It is vital to such a 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 darting hither and thither among the flowers; and I had the fancy that they were the souls of the town-sparrows of London and the smoky cities, and now gone wherever the good sparrows go. And a little way up the road before me, on the hill between the cactus hedges, I saw a grey donkey trotting; and I could almost have sworn that it was the donkey I had left at home.
He was trotting on ahead of me, and the outline of his erect and elfish ears was dark against the sky. He was evidently going somewhere with great determination; and I thought I knew to what appropriate place he was going, and that it was my fate to follow him like a moving omen. I lost sight of him later, for I had to complete the journey by train; but the train followed the same direction, which was up steeper and steeper hills. I began to realise more clearly where I was; and to know that the garden in the desert that had bloomed so suddenly about me had borne for many desert wanderers the name of the promised land. As the rocks rose higher and higher on every side, and hung over us like terrible and tangible clouds, I saw in the dim grass of the slopes below them something I had never seen before. It was a rainbow fallen upon the earth, with no part of it against the sky, but only the grasses and the flowers shining through its fine shades of fiery colour. I thought this also was like an omen; and in such a mood of idle mysticism there fell on 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 other vehicle for the last lap of the journey, a very courteous officer, an army surgeon, gave me a seat in an ambulance wagon; and it was under the shield of the red cross that I entered Jerusalem.
For suddenly, between a post of the wagon and a wrack of rainy cloud I saw it, uplifted and withdrawn under all the arching heavens of its history, alone with its benediction and its blasphemy, the city that is set upon a hill, and cannot be hid.
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CHAPTER III
THE GATES OF THE CITY
The men I met coming from Jerusalem reported all sorts of contradictory impressions; and yet my own impression contradicted them all. Their impressions were doubtless as true as mine; but I describe my own because it is true, and because I think it points to a neglected truth about the real Jerusalem. I need not say I did not expect the real Jerusalem to be the New Jerusalem; a city of 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 I was 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 side to new and vulgar things; full of the touts who seem only created for the tourists and the tourists who seem only created for the touts. There may be more of this in the place than pleases those who would idealise it. But I fancy there is much less of it than is commonly supposed in the reaction from such an ideal. It does not, like Cairo, offer the exciting experience of twenty guides fighting for one traveller; of young Turks drinking American cocktails as a protest against Christian wine. The town is quite inconvenient 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 books of Biblical research. He might remember drawings like diagrams representing a well or a wine-press, rather a dry well, so to speak, and a wine-press very difficult to associate with wine. These hard colourless outlines never did justice to the colour of the East, but even to 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 bazaars glowing 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 first impression 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 had an 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 was conscious of another which at once completed and contradicted it. It was not only like a memory of Rye, it was mixed with a memory of the Mount St. Michael, which stands among the sands of Normandy on the other side of the narrow seas. The first part of the sensation is that the traveller, as he walks the stony streets 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 sense that 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 him through the smallest cranny, or most accidental crack in rock or stone; it comes to him especially through those long narrow windows in the walls of the old fortifications; those slits in the stone through which the medieval archers used their bows and 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 from the walls of Jerusalem. Then I remembered that in the same strips of medieval landscape could be seen always, here and there, a steep hill crowned with a city of towers. And I knew I had the mystical and 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 more strange when the hill cannot anywhere be hid, even from the citizen in 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 walls and 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 Moslems late in the Middle Ages; but they are almost exactly like the walls that were being built by the Christians at or before that time. The Crusader Edward, afterwards Edward the First, reared such battlements far away among the rainy hills of Wales. I do not know what elements were originally Gothic or what originally Saracenic. The Crusaders and the Saracens constantly copied each other while they combated each other; indeed it is a fact always to be found in such combats. It is one of the arguments against war that are really 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 from the Christian invaders, and even if they are not Christian they are in many ways strangely European. The wall and gates which now stand, whatever stood before them and whatever comes after them, carry a memory of those men from the West who came here upon that wild adventure, who climbed this rock and clung to it so perilously from the victory of Godfrey to the victory of Saladin; and that is why this momentary Eastern exile reminded me so strangely of the hill of Rye and of home.
I do not forget, of course, that all these visible walls and towers are but the battlements and pinnacles of a buried city, or of many buried cities. I do not forget that such buildings have foundations that are to us almost like fossils; the gigantic fossils of some other geological epoch. Something may be said later of those lost empires whose very masterpieces are to us like petrified monsters. From this height, after long histories unrecorded, fell the forgotten idol of the Jebusites, on that day when David’s javelin-men scaled the citadel and carried through it, in darkness behind his coloured curtains, the god whose image had never been made by man. Here was waged that endless war between the graven gods of the plain and the invisible god of the mountain; from here the hosts carrying the sacred fish of the Philistines were driven back to the sea from which their worship came. Those who worshipped on this hill had come out of bondage in Egypt and went into bondage in Babylon; small as was their country, there passed before them almost the whole pageant of the old pagan world. All its strange shapes and strong almost 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 or pre-historic interest may be touched on in its turn; but I am not dealing here 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 tied his horse to a wayside cross in the snow, and afterward saw it dangling 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 symbol the 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 Gothic town than the Babylonian; and that it reminded me, if not specially of the cross, at least of the soldiers who took the cross.
Nor do I forget the long centuries that have passed over the place since these medieval walls were built, any more than the far more interesting centuries that passed before they were built. But any one taking exception to the description on that ground may well realise, on consideration, that it is an exception that proves the rule. There is something very negative about Turkish rule; and the best and worst of it is in the word neglect. Everything that lived under the vague empire of Constantinople remained in a state of suspended animation like something frozen rather than decayed, like something sleeping rather than dead. It was a sort of Arabian spell, like that which turned princes and 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 a hundred 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 still strikes them as uncommon; as if it were the first fantastic sketch in the sketch-book of nature. I myself can never overcome the sense of something almost unearthly about grass growing upon human buildings. There is in it a wild and even horrible fancy, as if houses could grow hair. When I saw that green hair on the huge stone blocks of the 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 once of chaos and of sleep. It is said that the grass will not grow where the Turk sets his foot; but it is the other side of the same truth 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 Turk having been planted on this or that citadel; and certainly it was so planted with splendid valour and sensational victory. But this is the green banner that he plants on all his high cities in the end.
Therefore my immediate impression of the walls and gates was not contradicted by my consciousness of what came before and what came after that medieval period. It remained primarily a thing of walls and gates; a thing which the modern world does not perhaps understand so well as the medieval world. There is involved in it all that idea of definition which those who do not 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 run and where his exception shall stand. He cannot have a city that 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 agreed with each other in this, when they differed about everything else. It was true of practically all of them that when they built a city they built 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 sorts of buildings outside the wall; but they are outside the wall. Everybody is conscious of being inside or outside a boundary; but it is the whole character of the true suburbs which grow round our great industrial 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 city from within, nor by the resistance of the lands round about. It destroys at once the dignity of a town and the freedom of a countryside. The citizens are too new and numerous for citizenship; yet they never learn what there is to be learned of the ancient traditions of agriculture. The first sight of the sharp outline of Jerusalem is like a memory of the older types of limitation and liberty. Happy is the city that has a wall; and happier still if it is 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 cave at Bethlehem traditionally connected with the Nativity that the sceptics doubt whether any beasts of burden could have entered a stable that has to be reached by such steps. And indeed to any one in a modern city like London or Liverpool it may well appear odd, like a cab-horse climbing a ladder. But as a matter of fact, if the asses and goats of Jerusalem could not go up and downstairs, they could not go anywhere. However this may be, I mention the matter here merely as adding another touch to that angular profile which is the impression involved here. Strangely enough, there is something that leads up to this impression even in the labyrinth of mountains through which the road winds its way to the city. The hills round Jerusalem are themselves often hewn out in terraces, like a huge stairway. This is mostly for the practical and indeed profitable purpose of vineyards; and serves for a reminder that this ancient seat of civilisation has not lost the tradition of the mercy and the glory of the vine. But in outline such a mountain looks much like the mountain of 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 produced by this mountain city; and especially by its wall with gates like a house with windows. A gate, like a window, is primarily a picture-frame. The pictures that are found within the frame are indeed very various and sometimes very alien. Within this frame-work are 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 temporary and 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 all this 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 upon himself a shape.
Such a system of walls and gates, like many other things thought rude and 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 modern cities through a litter of slums. And there is no better way to get a preliminary plan of the city than to follow the wall and fix the gates in the memory. Suppose, for instance, that a man begins in the south with the Zion Gate, which bears the ancient name of Jerusalem. This, to begin with, will sharpen the medieval and even the Western impression first because it is here that he has the strongest sentiment of threading the narrow passages of a great castle; but also because the very name of the gate was given to this south-western hill by Godfrey and Tancred during the period of the Latin kingdom. I believe it is one of the problems of the scholars why the Latin conquerors called this hill the Zion Hill, when the other is obviously the sacred hill. Jerusalem is traditionally divided into four hills, but for practical purposes into two; the lower eastern hill where stood the Temple, and now stands the great Mosque, and the western where is the citadel and the Zion Gate to the south of it. I know nothing of such questions; and I attach no importance to the notion that has crossed my own mind, and which I only mention in 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 place before it was stormed by David; and even afterwards the Jebusites remained on this western hill, and some compromise seems to have been made with them. Is it conceivable, I wonder, that even in the twelfth century there lingered some local memory of what had once been a way of distinguishing Sion of the Jebusites from Salem of 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 stands on the other hill to the east. The great Mosque of Omar stands up like a peacock, lustrous with mosaics that are like plumes of 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 was not built by Omar. But it is my fixed intention to call it the Mosque of Omar, and with ever renewed pertinacity to continue calling it the Mosque of Omar. I possess a special permit from the Grand Mufti to call it the Mosque of Omar. He is the head of 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 place the Mosque of Omar, since the great Caliph desired and even designed such a building, though he did not build it. I suppose it is rather 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 were telescoped together by the excellent common sense of vulgar tradition. There could not be a better example of that great truth for all travellers; that popular tradition is never so right as when it is 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, I answer that Westminster Abbey is not used as an Abbey. But modern Englishmen would be much surprised if I were to refer to it as Westminster Church; to say nothing of the many modern Englishmen for whom it would be more suitable to call it Westminster Museum. And for whatever purposes the Moslems may actually use their great and glorious sanctuary, at least they have not allowed it 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 eastern plateau in place of the Temple; and the wall that runs round to it on the south side of the city contains only the Dung Gate, on which the fancy need not linger. All along outside this wall the ground falls away into the southern valley; and upon the dreary and stony steep opposite is the place called Acaldama. Wall and valley turn together round the corner of the great temple platform, and confronting the eastern wall, across the ravine, is the mighty wall of the Mount of Olives. On this side there are several gates now blocked up, of which the most famous, the Golden Gate, carries in its very uselessness a testimony to the fallen warriors of the cross. For there is a strange Moslem 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 Dome of the Rock; and standing near it, a man may see for the first time in the distance, another dome. It lies away to the west, but a little to 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 huddle of houses, that a man may first see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which 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 things near 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 Court of 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 city seemed to be heaped higher; and across the valley on the skirts of 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 bears the name of Herod; though it might well bear the name either of Godfrey or Saladin. For just outside it stands a pine-tree, and beside it a rude bulk of stone; where stood these great captains in turn, before they took Jerusalem. Then the wall runs on till it comes to the great Damascus Gate, graven I know not why 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 that the roses on the walls are not the Western roses of York or Lancaster, or that the swords which guarded them were not the straight swords of England or of France. Doubtless a deeper and more solemn memory ought to return immediately to the mind where that gate looks down the 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 such alien or awful things. I did not think of damask or damascene or the great Arabian city or even the conversion of St. Paul. I thought of my own little house in Buckinghamshire, and how the edge of 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 more rational and even utilitarian than the fashions of modernity. When a street in a new suburb is called Pretoria Avenue, the clerk living there does not set out from his villa with the cheerful hope of finding the road lead him to Pretoria. But the man leaving Aylesbury End does know it would lead him to Aylesbury; and the man going 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 something else as well.
I have heard that there is a low doorway at the entrance to a famous shrine which is called the Gate of Humility; but indeed in this sense all gates are gates of humility, and especially gates of this kind. Any one who has ever looked at a landscape under an archway will know what I mean, when I say that it sharpens a pleasure with a strange sentiment of privilege. It adds to the grace of distance something that makes it not only a grace but a gift. Such are the visions of remote places that appear in the low gateways of 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 come suddenly 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 at the side of one of these humble and human gateways there is a great gap in the wall, with a wide road running through it. There is something of 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 Men of Gotham. It suggests the old joke about the man who made a 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 impression of 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 has a way of sounding false. We shall now probably weary the world with calling the Germans barbaric, just as we very recently wearied the world with calling them cultured and progressive and scientific. But the thing is true though we say it a thousand times. And any one who wishes to understand the sense in which it is true has only to contemplate that 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 sacrifice of the permanent to the temporary. When the walls of the Holy City were overthrown for the glory of the German Emperor, it was hardly even for that everlasting glory which has been the vision and the temptation of great men. It was for the glory of a single day. It was something rather in the nature of a holiday than anything that 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 say that it destroyed a trophy to make a triumph. There is the true barbaric touch in this oblivion of what Jerusalem would look like a century after, or a year after, or even the day after. It is this which distinguishes the savage tribe on the march after a victory from the civilised army establishing a government, even if it be a tyranny. Hence the very effect of it, like the effect of the whole Prussian adventure in history, remains something negative and even nihilistic. The Christians made the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Moslems made the Mosque of Omar; but this is what the most scientific culture made at the end of the great century of science. It made an enormous hole. The only positive contribution of the nineteenth century to the spot is an unnaturally ugly clock, at the top of an ornamental tower, or a tower that was meant to be ornamental. It was erected, I believe, to commemorate the reign of 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 more tremendous negative effect of the gap by the gate. That remains a parable as 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 broad road that has led already to destruction.
The gap remains like a gash, a sort of wound in the walls; but it only 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 rather deepens than dies away. It is supported more than many would suppose even by the figures that appear in the gateways or pass in procession under the walls. The brown Franciscans and the white Dominicans would alone give some colour to a memory of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem; and there are other examples and effects which are less 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 white head-dress very like those we have all seen in a hundred pictures of tournaments or hunting parties, or the Canterbury Pilgrimage or 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 certain freedom and dignity in her movement, which is quite different at least from the shuffling walk of the shrouded Moslem women. She is a woman of Bethlehem, where a tradition, it is said, still claims as 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 one which 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 disappointed with 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 frightened of 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 orchards of Normandy or the hop-fields of Kent.
And just then there happened a coincidence that was also something like a catastrophe. I was idly watching, as it moved down the narrow street to one of the dark doorways, the head-dress, like a tower of white drapery, belonging to the Christian woman from the place where Christ was born. After she had disappeared into the darkness of the porch I continued to look vaguely at the porch, and thought how easily it might have been a small Gothic gate in some old corner of Rouen, or even Canterbury. In twenty such places in the town one may see the details that appeal to the same associations, so different and so distant. One may see that angular dogtooth ornament that makes the round Norman gateways look like the gaping mouths of sharks. One may see the pointed niches in the walls, shaped like windows and serving somewhat the purpose of brackets, on which were to stand sacred images possibly removed by the Moslems. One may come upon a small court planted with ornamental trees with some monument in the centre, which makes the precise impression of something in a small French town. There are no Gothic spires, but there are numberless Gothic doors and windows; and he who first strikes the place at this angle, as it were, may well feel the Northern element as native and the Eastern element as intrusive. While I was thinking all these things, something happened which in that 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 whole air 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 coming up 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 splash of paler vapour; a wan white cloud whose white seemed somehow more ominous than gloom. It went over the high citadel like a white wild goose flying; and a few white feathers fell.
It was the snow; and it snowed day and night until that Eastern city was sealed up like a village in Norway or Northern Scotland. It rose in the streets till men might almost have been drowned in it like a sea of solid foam. And the people of the place told me 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 scene in so dreamy a fashion, it seemed merely like a dramatic conclusion to 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 roofs and turrets of the mountain town; for there is an aspect in which snow looks less like frozen water than like solidified light. As the snow accumulated there accumulated also everywhere those fantastic effects of frost which seem to fit in with the fantastic qualities of medieval architecture; and which make an icicle seem like the mere extension of a gargoyle. It was the atmosphere that has led so many romancers to make medieval Paris a mere black and white study of night and snow. Something had redrawn in silver all things from the rude ornament on the old gateways to the wrinkles on the ancient hills of Moab. Fields of white still spotted with green swept down into the valleys between us and the hills; and high above them the Holy City lifted her head into the thunder-clouded heavens, wearing a white head-dress like a daughter of the Crusaders.
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CHAPTER IV
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIGHT-SEEING
Various cultivated critics told me that I should find Jerusalem disappointing; and I fear it will disappoint them that I am not disappointed. Of the city as a city I shall try to say something elsewhere; but the things which these critics have especially in mind are at once more general and more internal. They concern something tawdry, squalid or superstitious about the shrines and those who use them. Now the mistake of critics is not that they criticise the world; it is that they never criticise themselves. They compare the alien with the ideal; but they do not at the same time compare themselves with the ideal; rather they identify themselves with the ideal. I have met a tourist who had seen the great Pyramid, and who told me that the Pyramid looked small. Believe me, the tourist looked much smaller. There is indeed another type of traveller, who is not at all small in the moral mental sense, who will confess such disappointments quite honestly, as a piece of realism about his own sensations. In that case he generally suffers from 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 that he did not think much of the Pyramid because it was not so tall as the Peak. I pointed out to him that he was really offering the tallest possible tribute to a work of man in comparing it to a mountain; even if he thought it was a rather small mountain. I suggested that it was a rather large tombstone. I appealed to those with whom I debated in that district, as to whether they would not be faintly surprised to find such a monument during their quiet rambles in a country churchyard. I asked whether each 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 realism applies 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 often when 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 room apparently 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 a couchant lion. If it was a real lion it would hardly be less arresting merely because it was near; nor could the first emotion of the traveller be adequately described as disappointment. In such cases there is generally some profit in looking at the monument a 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 can be 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 Sphinx that 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 face of the young Napoleon. Is it not barely possible, I hinted to 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 a greater matter than these dead things of the desert; in connection with a tomb to which even the Pyramids are but titanic lumber, and a presence greater than the Sphinx, since it is not only a riddle but 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 impressions of an ordinary tourist like myself, to whom much that is really full of an archaic strength may seem merely stiff, or much that really deals with a deep devotional psychology may seem merely distorted. In short I would put myself in the position of the educated Englishman who does quite honestly receive a mere impression of idolatry. Incidentally, I may remark, it is the educated Englishman who is the idolater. It is he who only reverences the place, and does not reverence the reverence for the place. It is he who is supremely concerned about whether a mere object is old or new, or whether a mere ornament is gold or gilt. In other words, it is he who values the visible things rather than the invisible; for no sane man can doubt that invisible things are vivid to the priests and pilgrims of these shrines.
In the midst of emotions that have moved the whole world out of its course, girt about with crowds who will die or do murder for a definition, the educated English gentleman in his blindness bows down to wood and stone. For the only thing wrong about that admirable man is that he is blind about himself.
No man will really attempt to describe his feelings, when he first stood at the gateway of the grave of Christ. The only record relevant here 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 are particularly fastidious. The guide who showed me the Sepulchre was not particularly noisy or profane or palpably mercenary; he was rather more than less sympathetic than the same sort of man who might have shown me Westminster Abbey or Stratford-on-Avon. He was 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 assumption that nobody else knew it. If there was anything to smile at, in associations so sacred, it was the elaborate simplicity with which he told the first facts of the Gospel story, as if he were evangelising a savage. Anyhow, he did not talk like a cheap-jack at a stall; but rather like a teacher in an infant school. He made it very clear that Jesus Christ was crucified in case any one should suppose he was beheaded; and often stopped in his narrative 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 reason whatever for doubting that he may have been a better man than I. I gave 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 monastic custodians of the shrines; but I see nothing surprising about that. I am not quite so ignorant as not to know that without the monastic brotherhoods, supported by such charity, there would not by this time be anything to see in Jerusalem at all. There was only one class 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 as grand as the men who made them. The incongruities there are, are those of local colour. In connection, by the way, with what I said about beasts of burden, I mounted a series of steep staircases to the roof of the convent beside the Holy Sepulchre. When I got to 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 generally means 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 is still 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 world of ideas, with what is weak in his own world of ideas. I will take an 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 that thorough-fare which Mr. Max Beerbohm, with his usual easy exactitude of 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 arts to the sort of people among whom I was brought up. It is also true that such a taste, in various forms and degrees, was fairly common in the world which may be symbolised as Kensington High Street. And whether or no it is a tribute, it is certainly a truth that most people with an artistic turn in Kensington High Street would have been very much shocked, in their sense of propriety, if they had seen the popular shrines of Jerusalem; the sham gold, the garish colours, the fantastic tales and the feverish tumult. But what I want such people to do, and what they never do, is to turn this truth round. I want them to imagine, not a Kensington aesthete walking down David Street to the Holy Sepulchre, but a Greek monk or a Russian pilgrim walking down Kensington High Street to Kensington Gardens. I will not insist here on all the hundred plagues of plutocracy that would really surprise such a Christian peasant; especially that curse of an irreligious society (unknown in religious societies, Moslem as well as Christian) the detestable denial of all dignity to 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 till his sight was blasted by a prodigy. He would either fall on his knees as before a shrine, or cover his face as from a sacrilege. He would have seen the Albert Memorial. There is nothing so conspicuous in Jerusalem. There is nothing so gilded and gaudy in Jerusalem. Above all, there is nothing in Jerusalem that is on so large a scale and at the same time in so gay and glittering a style. My simple Eastern Christian would almost certainly be driven to cry 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 prayers and heathen sacrifices of a lost humanity. I fancy he would feel a desire to be at home again amid the humble shrines of Zion. I really cannot imagine what he would feel, if he were told that the gilded idol was neither a god nor a demon, but a petty German prince who had some slight influence in turning us into the tools of Prussia.
Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens as something quite natural. I feel it so because I have been brought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at the graven images 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 of the 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 possibly a 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 might think about the Holy Sepulchre, do not think anything at all about the Albert Memorial. They are quite unconscious of how strange a thing it is; and that simply because they are used to it. The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their coloured background; and they are surely none the worse if they still feel rather more of the meaning of the colours. It may be said that they retain their childish illusion about their Albert Memorial. I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where a special curse was laid on those who can become like little children. And I never could understand why such critics who agree that the kingdom of heaven is for children, should forbid it to 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 much surprised at the place of tinsel in our lives as we are at its place in theirs. If we are critical of the petty things they do to glorify great things, they would find quite as much to criticise (as in Kensington 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 principle of self-criticism, as the necessary condition of all criticism. It applies quite as much, for instance, to the other great complaint which my Kensington friend would make after the complaint about paltry ornament; the complaint about what is commonly called backsheesh. Here again there is really something to complain of; though much of the fault is not due to Jerusalem, but rather to London and New York. The worst superstition of Jerusalem, like the worst profligacy of Paris, is a thing so much invented for Anglo-Saxons that it might be called an Anglo-Saxon institution. But here again the critic could only really judge fairly if he realised with what abuses at home he ought really to compare this particular abuse abroad. He ought to imagine, for example, the feelings of a religious Russian peasant if he really understood all the highly-coloured advertisements covering High Street Kensington Station. It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would 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 our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very 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 would really be a more unworthy sight than a scramble of poor guides; yet this is what would be conveyed by all the glare of gaudy advertisement to anybody who saw and understood it for the first time. Yet for us who are familiar with it all that gaudy advertisement fades into a background, just as the gaudy oriental patterns fade into a background for those oriental priests and pilgrims. Just as the innocent Kensington gentleman is wholly unaware that 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 are dark against the fainter and more fading gold in which are traced only the humbler haloes of the Twelve Apostles.
But all these misunderstandings are merely convenient illustrations and introductions, leading up to the great fact of the main misunderstanding. It is a misunderstanding of the whole history and philosophy of the position; that is the whole of the story and the whole moral of the story. The critic of the Christianity of Jerusalem emphatically manages to miss the point. The lesson he ought to learn 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 gaudy as any advertisement of a soap; but one saint does not drive out another saint as one soap drives out another soap. They do not forget their recent idolatries, as the educated English are now trying to forget their very recent idolatry of everything German. These Christian bodies have been in Jerusalem for at least fifteen hundred years. Save for a few years after the time of Constantine and a few years after the First Crusade, they have been practically persecuted all the time. At least they have been under heathen masters whose attitude towards Christendom was hatred and whose type of government was despotism. No man living in the West can form the faintest conception of what it must have been to live in the very heart of the East through the long and seemingly everlasting epoch of Moslem power. A man in Jerusalem was in the centre of the Turkish Empire as a man in Rome was in the centre of the Roman Empire. The imperial power of Islam stretched away to the sunrise and the sunset; westward to the mountains of Spain and eastward towards the wall of China. It must have seemed as if the whole earth belonged to Mahomet to those who in this rocky city renewed their hopeless witness to Christ. What we have to ask ourselves is not whether we happen in all respects to agree with them, but whether we in the same condition 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 custom and how much a compromise even with custom; how much a thing made facile by 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 wild Eastern 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 would not be fighting for the Holy Fire or wrangling with beggars in the Holy Sepulchre. He would not be hanging fantastic lamps on a pillar peculiar to the Armenians, or peering into the 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 towards a more distant city; where, above the only formal and official open place in Jerusalem, the mighty mosaics of the Mosque of Omar proclaim 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 put to those who say that the Christianity of Jerusalem is degraded. After a thousand years of Turkish tyranny, the religion of a London fashionable preacher would not be degraded. It would be destroyed. It would not be there at all, to be jeered at by every prosperous tourist out of a train de luxe. It is worth while to pause upon the point; for nothing has been so wholly missed in our modern religious ideals as the ideal of tenacity. Fashion is called progress. Every new fashion is called a new faith. Every faith is a faith which offers everything except faithfulness. It was never so necessary to insist that most of the really vital and valuable ideas in the world, including Christianity, would never have survived at all if they had 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 progress and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all. Some think that this would be an improvement in itself. We have come to live morally, as the Japs live literally, in houses of paper. But they are pavilions made of the morning papers, which have to be burned on the appearance of the evening editions. Well, a thousand years hence the Japs may be ruling in Jerusalem; the modern Japs who no 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 yet ruled Jerusalem. But though we may think the Christian chapels as 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 of themselves but ourselves, the sights of Jerusalem also illustrate the 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 saintlier than 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 not notice the small things about it. They do not even discover what is interesting about their own disappointment. And similarly even those who are truly irritated by the unfamiliar fashions of worship in a place like Jerusalem, do not know how to discover what 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 ritual and 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 fact about such ornament of such places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as may really be counted unworthy of them. They would realise that what they would most instinctively reject as superstitious does not 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 not the harsh or ascetic decoration of a Spanish cloister; it is much more like the pompous yet frivolous decorations of a Parisian hotel. In short, in so far as the shrine has really been defaced it has not been defaced by the Dark Ages, but rather if anything by the Age of Reason. It is the enlightened eighteenth century, which regarded itself as the very noonday of natural culture and common sense, that has really though indirectly laid its disfiguring finger on the dark but dignified Byzantine temple. I do not particularly mind it myself; for in such great matters I do 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 it is 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 every freethinker of any artistic taste would think his temple far less artistically 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 permanent man-trap in the idea of being modern. So that the moral of this matter is the same as that of the other; that these things should raise in us, not merely the question of whether we like them, but of whether there is anything very infallible or imperishable about what we like. At least the essentials of these things endure; and if they seem to have remained fixed as effigies, at least they have not faded like fashion-plates.
It has seemed worth while to insert here this note on the philosophy of sight-seeing, however dilatory or disproportionate it may seem. For I am particularly and positively convinced that unless these things can somehow or other be seen in the right historical perspective and 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 not worth seeing at all. Sight-seeing is a far more difficult and disputable matter than many seem to suppose; and a man refusing it altogether 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 far away across the luminous flats a faint triangular shape; the Pyramids. I could understand a man who had seen it turning his back and retracing his whole journey to his own country and his own home, saying, “I will go no 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 Jerusalem sitting 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 sense it is absurd to come at all. It is no more fantastic to turn back 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 has come for such a mood, he is not a fool to obey that mood. The way to 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 mood is in its nature moonshine. It may be said that this is especially true in the crowded and commonplace conditions in which most sight-seeing has to be done. It may be said that thirty tourists going together to see a tombstone is really as ridiculous as thirty poets going together to write poems about the nightingale. There would be something rather depressing about a crowd of travellers, walking over hill and dale after the celebrated cloud of Wordsworth; especially if the crowd is like the cloud, and moveth all together if it move at all. A vast mob assembled on 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 beforehand the 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 go in search of a surprise. To all of which there is only one answer; that such anticipation is absurd, and such realisation will be disappointing, that images will seem to be idols and idols will seem to be dolls, unless there be some rudiment of such a habit of mind as I have tried to suggest in this chapter. No great works will seem great, and no wonders of the world will seem wonderful, unless the angle from which they are seen is that of historical humility.
One more word may be added of a more practical sort. The place where the most passionate convictions on this planet are concentrated is not one 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 the Holy Fire bursts forth to declare that Christ is risen; and whether or 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 really does not expect. And whatever he may think about the philosophy of sight-seeing, it is not unlikely that he may see some sights.
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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 justify all the Christmas cards. The cards that spangle Bethlehem with frost are generally regarded by the learned merely as vulgar lies. At best they are regarded as popular fictions, like that which made the shepherds in the Nativity Play talk a broad dialect of Somerset. In the deepest sense of course this democratic tradition is truer than most history. But even in the cruder and more concrete sense the tradition about the December snow is not quite so false as is suggested. It is not a mere local illusion for Englishmen to picture the Holy Child in a snowstorm, as it would be for the Londoners to 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 idea behind 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 West or the North. Snow is a rarity, but winter is a reality. Whether we regard it as the divine purpose of a mystery or the human purpose of a myth, the purpose of putting such a feast in winter would be just the same in Bethlehem as it would be in Balham. Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.
In other words, the semi-tropical nature of the place, like its vulgarity and desecration, can be, and are, enormously exaggerated. But it is always hard to correct the exaggeration without exaggerating the correction. It would be absurd seriously to deny that Jerusalem is an Eastern town; but we may say it was Westernised without being modernised. Anyhow, it was medievalised before it was modernised. And in the same way it would be absurd to deny that Jerusalem is a Southern town, in the sense of being normally out of the way of snowstorms, but the truth can be suggested by saying that it has always known the quality of snow, but not the quantity. And the quantity of snow that fell on this occasion would have been something striking and even sensational in Sussex or Kent. And yet another way of putting the proportions of the thing would be to say that Jerusalem has been besieged more often and by more different kinds of people than any town upon the globe; that it has been besieged by Jews and Assyrians, Egyptians and Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, Persians and Saracens, Frenchmen and Englishmen; but perhaps never before in all its agony of ages has it ever really been 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 have been in a state of famine. The railway failed between Jerusalem and the nearest station. The roads were impassable between Jerusalem 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 struck down as if by lightning. Even when the snow began at last to melt it only threatened to turn the besieged fortress into a sort of island. A river that men could not ford flowed between Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives. Even a man walking about the ordinary streets could easily step up to his knees or up to his waist. Snow stood about like a new system of natural barricades reared in some new type of revolution. I have already remarked that what struck me most about the city was the 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 than the city wall; and it turned the eyes of all spectators inwards. Above all, by its very abnormality it accentuated the normal divisions and differences of the place; and made it more possible to distinguish and describe them like dramatis personae. The parts they played in the crisis of the snow were very like the 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 sharply against that blank background of white.
The first fact of course was a fact of contrast. When I said that the city struck me in its historic aspect as being at least as much a memory of the Crusaders as of the Saracens, I did not of course mean to deny the incidental contrasts between this Southern civilisation and the civilisation of Europe, especially northern Europe. The immediate difference was obvious enough when the gold and the gaudy vegetation of so comparatively Asiatic a city were struck by this strange blast out of the North. It was a queer spectacle to 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 accustomed to live under such palm-trees bowed down under such unearthly storms. Yet the very manner in which they bore it is perhaps the first fact to be noted among all the facts that make up the puzzling problem of Jerusalem. Odd as it may sound you can see that the true Orientals are 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 the desert do not know the answer to the snow, it seems to them unanswerable. But Christians fight with snow in a double sense; they fight with snow as they fight with snowballs. A Moslem left to himself would no more play with a snowball than make a toy of a thunderbolt. And this is really a type of the true problem that was raised by 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 wrongs of these Bible countries could occasionally be translated into Bible language. And I suggest this here, not in the least because it is 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 be unfortunate if this only means coming in contact with Western pedantry and even Western hypocrisy. As it is there is only too much danger that the local complaints against the government may be exactly 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 refreshing finishing 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 be called scriptural English. It would be a very good thing for everybody concerned if any really unjust or unpopular official were described only in terms taken from the denunciations of Jezebel and Herod. It would especially be a good thing for the official. If it were true it would be appropriate, and if it were untrue it would be absurd. When people are really oppressed, their condition can generally be 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 they most certainly often do, then the condition of those more powerful persons can also be described in few and simple words; such as crime 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 confidence he has ever felt in his own leading articles. If an Arab comes to 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 really feel that he towers over me and my perishing industrial civilisation with a terrible appeal to eternal things. I feel he is a figure more 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 solidarity as it functions for international reconstruction,” and so on, why then I must confess to the weakness of feeling my sympathies instantly and strangely chilled. I merely feel inclined to tell him that I can talk that sort of pidgin English better than he can. If he modelled himself on the great rebels and revolutionists of the Bible, it would at least be a considerable improvement in his literary style. But as a matter of fact something much more solid is involved than literary style. There is a logic and justice in the distinction, even in the world of ideas. That most people with much more education than the Arab, and therefore much less excuse than the Arab, entirely ignore that distinction, is merely a result of their ignoring ideas, and being satisfied with 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 such government as is self-made. They are not necessarily entitled to a special and elaborate machinery that somebody else has made. It is their right to make it for themselves, but it is also their duty to think of it for themselves. Self-government of a simple kind has existed in numberless simple societies, and I shall always 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 complicated societies 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 inventions and 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 is rather 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 presence of the snow in Palestine, especially in the light of the old proverb about 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 things no European has the right to do, is much sharper and clearer than the confusions of verbosity. On the one hand the things the 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 curiously enough the wrongs seem to me more real than the complaints. The real case against our Egyptian adventure was stated long ago by Randolph Churchill, when he denounced “a bondholder’s war”; it is in 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 mean the 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 there is no doubt that Jerusalem is a city, and the nations have come to its light.
The problem of the snow proved indeed the text for a tale touching the practical politics of the city. The English soldiers cleared the snow away; the Arabs sat down satisfied or stoical with the snow blocking their own doors or loading their own roofs. But the Jews, as the story went, were at length persuaded to clear away the snow in front of them, and then demanded a handsome salary 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 they are 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 they are in the old sense money-grabbers, but rather in the new sense money-grabbers (as an enemy would put it) men sincerely and 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 remain idle capitalists, but because they insist on being properly paid proletarians. With all this I shall deal, however, when I treat of the Jewish problem itself. The point for the moment is that the episode of the snow did in a superficial way suggest the 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 worst consequences of the calamity. Probably they sometimes save the inhabitants from something which the inhabitants do not regard as a calamity. It is the danger of all such foreign efficiency 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 it suggests 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 their political 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 political subtlety 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 commemorated in 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 blessing to two canons. The bishop had indeed recently appointed two canons to the service of the Church, but he had not secreted them under the floor of the chancel. There was another agreeable incident when the Turkish authorities, by an impulsive movement of religious toleration, sent for a Greek priest to bury Greek soldiers, and told him to 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 comedy is the perpetual social introduction to solid and smiling citizens who have been nearly hanged by the Turks. The fortunate gentleman seems still to be regarding his escape with a broad grin. If you were introduced to a polite Frenchman who had come straight from the guillotine, or to an affable American who had only just vacated the electrical chair, you would feel a faint curiosity about 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 mind and perhaps your lips would faintly form the syllables “What for?” But evidently, under Turkish rule, being hanged was like being knocked down by a cab; it might happen to anybody. This is a parenthesis, since I am only dealing here with the superficial experience of the streets, especially in the snow. But it will be well to safeguard it by saying that this unpolitical carelessness and comprehensiveness of the indiscriminate Turk had its tragic as well as its comic side. It was by no means everybody that escaped hanging; and there was a tree growing outside the Jaffa Gate at which men might still shudder as they pass it in the sunlight. It was what a modern revolutionary poet has called bitterly the Tree of Man’s Making; and what a medieval revolutionary poet called the 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 about the Moslem fatalism which seems so alien to political actuality. There was a popular legend or proverb that this terrible tree was in some way bound up with the power of the Turk, and perhaps the Moslem over a great part of the earth. There is nothing more strange about that Moslem fatalism than a certain gloomy magnanimity which can invoke omens and oracles against itself. It is astonishing how often the Turks seem to have accepted a legend or prophecy about their own ultimate failure. De Quincey mentions one of them in the blow that half broke the Palladium of Byzantium. It is said that the Moslems themselves predict the entry of 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 accepting the popular prophecy which declared that so long as it stood the Turkish Empire would stand. It was as if the wicked man of Scripture had daily watered a green bay-tree, to make sure that it should flourish.
In the last chapter I have attempted to suggest a background of the battlemented walls with the low gates and narrow windows which seem to relieve the liveliest of the coloured groups against the neutral tints of the North, and how this was intensified when the neutral tints were touched with the positive hue of snow. In the same merely impressionist spirit I would here attempt to sketch some of the externals of the actors in such a scene, though it is hard to do justice to such a picture even in the superficial matter of 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 most striking 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 blue that is Reckitt’s blue; the red is sure to have the enrichment of 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 be called aesthetic; and it is a nameless instinct that preserves these nameless tints. Like all such instincts, it can be blunted by a bullying rationalism; like all such children, these people do not know why they prefer the better, and can therefore 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 something like a chill to the blood when he first saw the black figures of the veiled Moslem women, sinister figures without faces. It is as if in that world every woman were a widow. When he realised that these were not the masked mutes at a very grisly funeral, but merely ladies literally obeying a convention of wearing veils 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 want five 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 woman of Bethlehem, is almost certainly a finer thing than the more coquettish 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 will soon feel in Jerusalem, if he has come from these more commercial cities of the East; a spiritual tone decidedly more delicate and dignified, like the clear air about the mountain city. Whatever the human vices involved, it is not altogether for nothing that this is the holy town of three great religions. When all is said, he will feel that there are some tricks that could not be played, some trades that could not be plied, some shops that could not be opened, within a stone’s throw of the Sepulchre. This indefinable seriousness has its own fantasies of fanaticism or 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 worn on each side of the face, like something between curls and whiskers. Sometimes they look strangely effeminate, like some rococo burlesque 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 often made to match. But though they may be ugly, or even horrible, they are not vulgar like the Jews at Brighton; they trail behind them too many primeval traditions and laborious loyalties, along with their grand though often greasy robes of bronze or purple velvet. They often wear on their heads that odd turban of fur worn by the Rabbis in the pictures of Rembrandt. And indeed that great name is not irrelevant; for the whole truth at the back of Zionism is in the difference between the picture of 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 world of the artist, who drew a Rabbi as he would a Brahmin. But Sargent had 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 on the strange hairy haloes that can still be seen on the shaven heads of the Jews of Jerusalem. And I should be sorry for any pogrom that brought down any of their grey wisps or whiskers in sorrow to the grave.
The whole scene indeed, seriousness apart, might be regarded as a fantasia for barbers; for the different ways of dressing the hair would alone serve as symbols of different races and religions. Thus the Greek priests of the Orthodox Church, bearded and robed in black with black towers upon their heads, have for some strange reason their hair bound up behind like a woman’s. In any case they have in their pomp a touch of the bearded bulls of Assyrian sculpture; and this strange fashion of curling if not oiling the Assyrian bull gives the newcomer an indescribable and illogical impression of the unnatural sublimity of archaic art. In the Apocalypse somewhere there is an inspiringly unintelligible allusion to men coming on the earth, whose hair is like the hair of women and their teeth like the teeth of lions. I have never been bitten by an Orthodox clergyman, and cannot say whether his teeth are at all leonine; though I have seen seven of them together enjoying their lunch at an hotel with decorum and dispatch. But the twisting of the hair in the womanish fashion does for us touch that note of the abnormal which the mystic meant to convey in 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 did not carry this curious coiffure, exclaimed, in a tone of heartrending surprise and distress, “Oh, he’s bobbed his hair!”
Here again of course even a superficial glance at the pageant of the street should not be content with its comedy. There is an intellectual interest in the external pomp and air of placid power in these ordinary Orthodox parish priests; especially if we compare them with the comparatively prosaic and jog-trot good nature of the Roman monks, called in this country the Latins. Mingling in the same crowd with these black-robed pontiffs can be seen shaven men in 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 grand simplicity and thought to finish the Crusades with a smile. The spectator will be wise to accept this first contrast that strikes the eye with an impartial intellectual interest; it has nothing to do with personal character, of course, and many Greek priests are as simple in their tastes as they are charming in their manners; while any Roman priests can find as much ritual as they may happen to want in other aspects of their own religion. But it is broadly true that Roman and Greek Catholicism are contrasted in this way in this country; and the contrast is the flat contrary to all our customary associations in the West. In the East it is Roman Catholicism that stands for much that we associate with Protestantism. It is Roman Catholicism that is by comparison plain and practical and scornful of superstition and concerned for social work. It is Greek Catholicism that is stiff with gold and gorgeous with ceremonial, with its hold on ancient history and its inheritance of imperial tradition. In the cant of our own society, we may say it is the Roman who rationalises and the Greek who Romanises. It is the Roman Catholic who is impatient with Russian and Greek childishness, and perpetually appealing for common sense. It is the Greek who defends such childishness as childlike faith and would rebuke such common sense as common scepticism. I do not speak 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 phrases I 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 Englishman and perhaps the English generally were disposed to make an alliance with the Greek Church, had only said by way of comment, “And a good thing too, the Greeks might do something at last.”
Anyhow the first impression is that the Greek is more gorgeous in black than the Roman in colours. But the Greek of course can also appear in colours, especially in those eternal forms 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 him by 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 sort of lustrous coloured paper they put inside Christmas crackers. This beauty has been best achieved in the North in the glory of coloured glass; and I have seen great Gothic windows in which one could really believe that the robes of martyrs were giant rubies or the starry sky a single enormous sapphire. But the colours of the West are transparent, the colours of 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 green doors and golden inner chambers, that are just like the entrance to an Eastern tale. The Orthodox are at least more oriental in 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 sort of silhouette of the crowd like the similar silhouette of the city, a profile or outline of the heads and hats, like the profile of the towers and spires. The tower that makes the Greek priest look like a walking catafalque is by no means alone among the horns thus fantastically exalted. There is the peaked hood of the Armenian priest, for instance; the stately survival of that strange Monophysite heresy which perpetuated itself in pomp and pride mainly through the sublime accident of the Crusades. That black cone also rises above the crowd with something of the immemorial majesty of a pyramid; and rightly so, for it is typical of the prehistoric poetry by which these places live that some say it is a surviving memory of Ararat and the Ark.
Again the high white headgear of the Bethlehem women, or to speak more strictly of the Bethlehem wives, has already been noted in another connection; but it is well to remark it again among the colours of the crowd, because this at least has a significance essential to all criticism of such a crowd. Most travellers from the West regard such an Eastern city far too much as a Moslem city, like the lady whom Mr. Maurice Baring met who travelled all over Russia, and thought all the churches were mosques. But in truth it is very hard to generalise about Jerusalem, precisely because it contains everything, and its contrasts are real contrasts. And anybody who doubts that its Christianity is Christian, a thing fighting for our own culture and morals on the borders of Asia, need only consider the concrete fact of these women of Bethlehem and their costume. There is no need to sneer in any unsympathetic fashion at all the domestic institutions of Islam; the sexes are never quite so stupid as some feminists represent; and I dare say a 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 even the notice of strange men. Often it is only made to disguise her; sometimes it is made to disfigure her. It may be the masking of the face as among the Moslems; it may be the shaving of the head as among the Jews; it may, I believe, be the blackening of the teeth and 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 not only shows all the beauty of her face; and she is often very beautiful. She also wears a towering erection which is as unmistakably meant 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 view of women, but should rather call the Christian view of women. This is the sort of dignity which must of necessity come from some 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 crowd offers such varied shapes and colours to the eye, when it also offers much deeper divisions and even dilemmas to the intelligence. The black dress of the Moslem woman and the white dress of the Christian woman are in sober truth as different as black and white. They stand for real principles in a real opposition; and the black and white will not easily disappear in the dull grey of our own compromises. The one tradition will defend what it regards as modesty, and the other what it regards as dignity, with passions far deeper than most of our paltry political appetites. Nor do I see how we can deny such a right of defence, even in the case we consider the less enlightened. It is made all the more difficult by the fact that those who consider themselves the pioneers of enlightenment generally also consider themselves the protectors of native races and aboriginal rights. Whatever view we take of the Moslem Arab, we must at least admit that the greater includes the less. It is manifestly absurd to say we have no right to interfere in his country, but have a right to interfere in his home.
It is the intense interest of Jerusalem that there can thus be two universes in the same street. Indeed there are ten rather than two; and it is a proverb that the fight is not only between Christian and Moslem, but between Christian and Christian. At this moment, it must be admitted, it is almost entirely a fight of Christian and Moslem allied against Jew. But of that I shall have to speak later; the point for the moment is that the varied colours of 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 ideas has such a visible and vivid heraldry.
And that fact alone may well leave the spectator with one final reflection; for it is a matter in which the modern world may well have to learn something from the motley rabble of this remote Eastern town.
It may be an odd thing to suggest that a crowd in Bond Street or Piccadilly should model itself on this masquerade of religions. It would be facile and fascinating to turn it into a satire or an extravaganza. Every good and innocent mind would be gratified with the image of a bowler hat in the precise proportions of the Dome of 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 dominated with 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 insinuate that we are not very likely ever to meet them in the Strand. A man wearing whiskers is not even compelled to plead some sort of excuse or authority for wearing whiskers, as the Jew can for wearing ringlets; and though the Anglican clergyman may indeed be very loyal to his mother church, there might be considerable hesitation if his mother bade him bind his hair. Nevertheless a more historical view of the London and Jerusalem crowds will show as far from impossible to domesticate such symbols; that some day a lady’s jewels 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 them as inferior to ourselves.
When the Crusaders came to Palestine, and came riding up that road from Jaffa where the orange plantations glow on either side, they came with motives which may have been mixed and are certainly disputed. There may have been different theories among the Crusaders; there are certainly different theories among the critics of the Crusaders. Many sought God, some gold, some perhaps black magic. But whatever else they were in search of, they were not in search of the picturesque. They were not drawn from a drab civilisation by that mere thirst for colour 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 men who rode up that road were dressed to match the most glorious orange 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 household of 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 more significant than the corresponding symbols of the Eastern civilisation. It is true that heraldry began beautifully as an art and afterwards degenerated into a science. But even in being a science it had to possess a significance; and the Western colours were often allegorical where the Eastern were only accidental. To a certain extent this more philosophical ornament was doubtless imitated; and I have remarked elsewhere on the highly heraldic lions which even the Saracens carved over the gate of St. Stephen. But it is the extraordinary and even exasperating fact that it was not imitated as the most meaningless sort of modern vulgarity is imitated. King Richard’s great red hat embroidered with beasts and birds has not overshadowed the earth so much as the billycock, which no one has yet thought of embroidering with any such natural and universal imagery. The cockney tourist is not only more likely to set out with the intention of knocking them, but he has actually knocked them; and Orientals are imitating the tweeds of the tourist more than they imitated the stripes of the squire. It is a curious and perhaps melancholy truth that the world is imitating our worst, our weariness and our dingy decline, when it did not imitate our best and the high moment of our morning.
Perhaps it is only when civilisation becomes a disease that it becomes an infection. Possibly it is only when it becomes a very virulent disease that it becomes an epidemic. Possibly again that is the meaning both of cosmopolitanism and imperialism. Anyhow the tribes sitting by Afric’s sunny fountains did not take up the song when Francis of Assisi stood on the very mountain of the Middle Ages, singing the Canticle of the Sun. When Michael Angelo carved a statue in snow, Eskimos did not copy him, despite their large natural quarries or resources. Laplanders never made a model of the Elgin Marbles, with a frieze of reindeers instead of horses; nor did Hottentots try to paint Mumbo Jumbo as Raphael had painted Madonnas. But many a savage king has worn a top-hat, and the barbarian has sometimes been so debased as to add to it a pair of trousers. Explosive bullets and the brutal factory system numbers of advanced natives are anxious to possess. And it was this reflection, arising out of the mere pleasure of the eye in the parti-coloured crowd before me, that brought back my mind to the chief problem and peril of our position in Palestine, on which I touched earlier in this chapter; the peril which is largely at 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 not so much the English merchant as the Jewish money-lender. I shall write elsewhere of better types of Jew and the truths they really represent; but the Jewish money-lender is in a curious and complex sense the representative of this unfortunate paradox. He is not only unpopular both in the East and West, but he is unpopular in 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 bustles and hustles too much; and in Palestine some of the unpopularity even 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 the better sort of Jew, or of the better sort of British influence. The same ignominious inversion which reproduces everywhere the factory chimney without the church tower, which spreads a cockney commerce but not a Christian culture, has given many men a vague feeling that the influence of modern civilisation will surround these ragged but coloured groups with something as dreary and discoloured, as unnatural and as desolate as the unfamiliar snow in which they were shivering as I watched them. There seemed a sort of sinister omen in this strange visitation that the north had sent them; in the fact that when the north wind blew at last, it had only scattered on them this silver dust of death.
It may be that this more melancholy mood was intensified by that pale 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 my own country against my own door I should have thought it the triumph of 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 it were not comic but tragic. The news that came in seemed in that little lonely 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 regarding the war, merely as an unmixed misery, and here the misery was really unmixed. As the snow began to melt corpses were found in it, homes were hopelessly buried, and even the gradual clearing of the roads only brought him stories of the lonely hamlets lost in the hills. It seemed as if a breath of the aimless destruction that wanders in the world had drifted across us; and no task remained for men but 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 tree of the hundred deaths, that was the type of the eternal Caliphate of the Crescent, was cast down and lying broken in the snow.
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CHAPTER VI
THE GROUPS OF THE CITY
Palestine is a striped country; that is the first effect of landscape on the eye. It runs in great parallel lines wavering into vast hills and valleys, but preserving the parallel pattern; as if drawn boldly but accurately with gigantic chalks of green and grey and red and yellow. The natural explanation or (to speak less foolishly) the natural process of this is simple enough. The stripes are the strata of the rock, only they are stripped by the great rains, so that everything has to grow on ledges, repeating yet again that terraced character to 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 commonly a red clay richer than that of Devon; a red clay of which it would be 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 is literally crowded with those crimson anemones which might well have called forth the great saying touching Solomon in all his glory. And even what rock there is is coloured with a thousand secondary and tertiary tints, as are the walls and streets of the Holy City which is built from the quarries of these hills. For the old stones of the old Jerusalem are as precious as the precious stones of 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 might be 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 forget that recurrent things are eternal things. We tend to forget that subtle 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 them do not prove that they did not realise them. When Wordsworth speaks of “the clouds that gather round the setting sun,” we assume that he has seen every shadow of colour and every curve of form; but when the Hebrew poet says “He hath made the clouds his chariot”; we do not always realise that he was full 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 dawn was always grey in the Stone Age or brown in the Bronze Age.
But there is another parable written in those long lines of many-coloured clay and stone. Palestine is in every sense a stratified country. It is not only true in the natural sense, as here where the clay has fallen away and left visible the very ribs of the hills. It is true in 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 frontier does 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 not beside the Christian but on top of the Christian. It is not merely a 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 besieged from 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 states are houses in which the kitchen has declared war on the drawing-room. But this will give no notion of the toppling pagoda of political and religious and racial differences, of which the name is Palestine. To explain that it is necessary to give the traveller’s first impressions more particularly in their order, and before I return to this view of the society as stratified, I must state the problem more practically as it presents itself while the society still seems fragmentary.
We are always told that the Turk kept the peace between the Christian sects. It would be nearer the nerve of vital truth to say that he made the war between the Christian sects. But it would be nearer still to say that the war is something not made by Turks but made up by infidels. The tourist visiting the 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 fraticidal war perpetually waged by Christian against Christian in Jerusalem. It freshens the free sense of adventure to wander through those crooked and cavernous streets, expecting every minute to see the Armenian Patriarch trying to stick a knife into the Greek Patriarch; just as it would add to the romance of London to linger about Lambeth and Westminster in the hope of seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury locked in a deadly grapple with the President of the Wesleyan Conference. And if we return to our homes at evening without having actually seen these things with the eye of flesh, the vision has none the less shone on 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 is an armed peace.
I have already explained the sense in which I say that the Moslems are unhistoric or even anti-historic. Perhaps it would be near the truth to say that they are prehistoric. They attach themselves to the tremendous truisms which men might have realised before they had any political experience at all; which might have been scratched with 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 need for lies. But their mood is not historic, they do not wish to grapple with the past; they do not love its complexities; nor do they understand the enthusiasm for its details and even its doubts. Now in all this the Moslems of a place like Jerusalem are the very opposite of the Christians of Jerusalem. The Christianity of Jerusalem is highly historic, and cannot be understood without historical imagination. And this is not the strong point perhaps of those among us who generally record their impressions of the place. As the educated Englishman does not know the history of England, it would be unreasonable to 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 include the Roman Empire in the West and in the East, the Catholic Church in its two great divisions, the Jewish race, the memories of Greece and Egypt, and the whole Mahometan world in Asia and Africa. It may be that he regards these as small things; but I should be glad if he would cast his eye over human history, and tell me what are the large things. The truth is that the things that meet to-day in Jerusalem 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 bored by them. But to understand them it is necessary to have something which 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 conflicts with the statement that they are all about small points of theology. I do not admit that theological points are small points. Theology is only thought applied to religion; and those who prefer a thoughtless religion need not be so very disdainful of others with a more rationalistic taste. The old joke that the Greek sects only differed about a single letter is about the lamest and most illogical joke in the world. An atheist and a theist only differ by a single letter; yet theologians are so subtle as to distinguish definitely between the two. But though I do not in any case allow that it is idle to be concerned about theology, as a matter of actual fact these quarrels are not chiefly concerned about theology. They are concerned about history. They are concerned with the things about which the only human sort of history is concerned; great memories of great men, great battles for great ideas, the love of brave people for beautiful places, and the faith by which the dead are alive. It is quite true that with this 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 than about religion, in the sense of theology. That is, they are just such heroic passions about the past as we call in the West by the name of nationalism; but they are conditioned by the extraordinarily complicated position of the nations, or what corresponds to the nations. We of the West, if we wish to understand it, must imagine ourselves as left with all our local loves and family memories unchanged, but the places affected by them intermingled and tumbled about by some almost inconceivable convulsion. We must imagine cities and landscapes to have turned on some unseen pivots, or been shifted about by some unseen machinery, so that our nearest was furthest and our remotest enemy 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 threads of 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 loyalties as steady as the memories and loyalties of the little crowd in 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 truth and falsehood in a chaos of time and space.
We have to conceive that the Tomb of Napoleon is in the middle of Stratford-on-Avon, and that the Nelson Column is erected on the field of Bannockburn; that Westminster Abbey has taken wings 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 shrine of Lourdes have to look for it in the Island of Runnymede, and that the only existing German statue of Bismarck is to be found in the Pantheon at Paris. This intolerable topsy-turvydom is no exaggeration of the way in which stories cut across each other and sites are imposed on each other in the historic chaos of the Holy City. Now we in the West are very lucky in having our nations normally distributed into their native lands; so that good patriots can talk about themselves without perpetually annoying their neighbours. Some of the pacifists tell us that national frontiers and divisions are evil because they exasperate us to war. It would be far truer to say that national frontiers and divisions keep us at peace. It would be far truer to say that we can always love each other so long as we do not see each other. But the people of 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 naturally as a flower springs from a flower-bed, they have to bless the soil and curse the stones that stand on it. While the land we love is solid under our feet to the earth’s centre, they have to see all 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 modern city is a big town full of small things. All the most important and interesting powers in history are here gathered within the area of a quiet village; and if they are not always friends, at least they are necessarily neighbours. This is a point of intellectual interest, and even intensity, that is far too little realised. It is a matter of modern complaint that in a place like Jerusalem the Christian groups 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 they even meet each other? In a large town men live in small cliques, which are much narrower than classes; but in this small town they live at least by large contacts, even if they are conflicts. Nor is it really true, in the daily humours of human life, that they are only conflicts. I have heard an eminent English clergyman from Cambridge bargaining for a brass lamp with a Syrian of the Greek Church, and asking the advice of a Franciscan friar who was standing smiling in the same shop. I have met the same representative of the Church of 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 often would 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 once in a lifetime. Even if he were a bigot, he would be bound in 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 other people bigots, but at the worst they could not be unconscious bigots. They could not live in such uncorrected complacency as is possible to a larger social set in a larger social system. They could not be 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 something of chivalry in the courtesy of their armed truce, and it is a great school of manners that includes such differences in morals.
This is an aspect of the interest of Jerusalem which can easily be neglected and is not easy to describe. The normal life there is intensely exciting, not because the factions fight, but rather because they do not fight. Of the abnormal crisis when 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 great part of the time that what was picturesque and thrilling was not the war but the peace. The sensation of being in this little town is rather like that of being at a great international congress. It is like that moving and glittering social satire, in which diplomatists can join in a waltz who may soon be joining in a war. For the religious and political parties have yet another point in common with separate nations; that even within this narrow space the complicated curve of their frontiers is really more or 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 Frenchman of the French nation, yet he may no more expect to make a Moslem an Armenian than the Frenchman expects to make an Englishman a Frenchman. If, as we are told, the quarrels could be condemned as merely theological, 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 like the 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 sort of 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 such polished intercourse; including especially two men whose experience and 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 topmost layer of Western officialism, we might indeed find it not inconvenient to 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 his mere presence and history is so strangely picturesque that he might be 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 the Southern and Secessionist army, and still keeps alive in every detail, not merely the virtues but the very gestures of the old Southern and Secessionist aristocrat.
He afterward became a clergyman of the Episcopalian Church, and served as a chaplain in the Spanish-American war, then, at an age when most men have long retired from the most peaceful occupations, he was sent out by President Wilson to the permanent battlefield of Palestine. The brilliant services he performed there, in the protection of British and American subjects, are here chiefly interesting as throwing a backward light on the unearthly topsy-turvydom of Turkish rule. There appears in his experiences something in such rule which we are perhaps apt to forget in a vision of stately Eastern princes and gallant Eastern warriors, something more tyrannical 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 knows whether the Sultan is good or bad, and he gives the same Vizier a thousand pounds or a thousand lashes. I have heard Dr. Glazebrook describe a whole day of hideous hesitation, in which fugitives for whom he pleaded were allowed four times to embark and four times were brought back again to their prison. There is something there dizzy as well as dark, a whirlpool in the very heart of Asia; and something wilder than our own worst oppressions in the peril of 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 sentiment for the white hair of the consul, and the strange respect that many Moslems feel for the minister of any religion. Once at least the trembling rock of barbaric rule nearly fell on him and killed him. By a sudden movement of lawlessness the Turkish military authorities sent 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 against organised Prussia under the full criticism of organised Europe. He was rather standing in a den of brigands, most of whom had never heard of the international rules they violated. Finally by another freak of friendliness they left him and his papers 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 from Palestine and all possibilities that tyranny might return and reign for ever. But I have sometimes fancied that, in that ghastly silence, he may have heard again only the guns of Lee and the last battle in the Wilderness.
If the mention of the American Consul refers back to the oppression of the past, the mention of the Military Governor brings back all the problems of the present. Here I only sketch these groups as I first found them in the present; and it must be remembered that my present is already past. All this was before the latest change from military to civil government, but the mere name of Colonel Storrs raises a question which is rather misunderstood in 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 militarism to a liberal policy akin to parliamentarism. I think this a fallacy, and a fallacy not uncommon in journalism, which is professedly very much up to date, and actually very much behind the times. As a fact it is nearly four years behind the times, for it is thinking in terms of the old small and rigidly professional army. Colonel Storrs is the very last man to be called militaristic in the narrow sense; he is a particularly liberal and enlightened type of the sort of English gentleman who readily served his country in war, but who is rather particularly fitted to serve her in politics or literature. Of course many purely professional soldiers have liberal and artistic tastes; as General Shea, one of the organisers of 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 is now still more strange to forget that most men are soldiers. I fancy there 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 under General Bols at the seat of government on the Mount of Olives, were certainly not narrowed by any military professionalism, and had if anything the mark of quite different professions. One was a very shrewd and 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 all dressed 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 about all these other trades and twenty more. Incidentally, and by way of 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 revived national tongue; whereupon the Governor of Jerusalem finished his Hebrew speech for him—whether to exactly the same effect or not it would be impertinent to inquire. He is a man rather recalling the eighteenth century aristocrat, with his love of wit and classical learning; one of that small group of the governing class that contains his uncle, Harry Cust, and was warmed with the generous culture of George Wyndham. It was a purely mechanical distinction between the military and civil government that would lend 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 English newspapers afterwards is often amusing enough; but I have only mentioned the 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 representative in fact gave place to a system representative in form but financial in fact. That is what the Arabs and many of the English fear; and with the mention of that fear we come to the next stratum after the official. It must be remembered that I am not at this stage 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 call the official head of the Zionists an old friend in a matter quite remote from 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 poor to medical interference to the destruction of all moral independence. He criticised with great effect the proposal of legislators to kidnap anybody else’s child whom they chose to suspect of a feeblemindedness they 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 laws to people whom no sane man would call lunatics. It is as if they were to alter the terms of a quarantine law from “lepers” to “light-haired persons”; and then say blandly that the principle was the same. The humour and human sympathy of a Jewish doctor was very welcome to us when we were accused of being Anti-Semites, and we afterwards asked Dr. Eder for his own views on the Jewish problem. We found he was then a very strong Zionist; and this was long before he had the faintest chance of figuring as a leader of Zionism. And this accident is important; for it stamps the sincerity of the small group of original Zionists, who were in favour of this nationalist ideal when all the international Jewish millionaires were against it. To my mind the most serious point now against it is that the millionaires are for it. But it is enough to note here the reality of the ideal in 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 in the wrong place, which sometimes makes the genuine Zionists unpopular with the English, who themselves suffer unpopularity for supporting them. For though I am called an Anti-Semite, there were really periods of official 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 slaves of 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-Semitic than the native Christians. Both are more or less so; and have formed a sort of alliance out of the fact. The banner carried by the mob bore the Arabic inscription “Moslems and Christians are brothers.” It is as if the little wedge of Zionism had closed up the cracks of the Crusades.
Of the Christian crowds in that partnership, and the Christian creeds they 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 order in the stratification of history. It is too often forgotten that in these 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 Byzantine decline than in that Semitic revival. And I will add what I cannot here develop or defend; that in the long run it is best that the Pax Romana should return; and that the suzerainty of those lands at 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 is in that philosophy, for all the talk of its persecutions in the past, a possibility of comprehension and many-sided sympathy which is not 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 Moslem part of the mixed crowds that I chiefly remember; which touches the same truth that the Christians are the more potentially tolerant. But many of the Moslem leaders are as dignified and human as many of the Zionist leaders; the Grand Mufti is a man I cannot imagine as either insulting anybody, or being conceivably the object of insult. The Moslem Mayor of Jerusalem was another such figure, belonging also I believe to one of the Arab aristocratic houses (the Grand Mufti is a descendant of Mahomet) and I shall not forget his first appearance at the first of the riotous meetings in which I found myself. I will give it as the first of two final impressions with which I will end this chapter, I fear on a note of almost anarchic noise, the unearthly beating and braying of the Eastern gongs and horns of two fierce desert faiths against each other.
I first saw from the balcony of the hotel the crowd of riotors come rolling up the street. In front of them went two fantastic figures turning like teetotums in an endless dance and twirling two crooked and 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 Law taking the chair, and Mr. Lloyd George addressing the meeting, Mr. Law and Mr. Lloyd George would only hop and caper in front of a procession, spinning round and round till they were dizzy, and waving and crossing a pair of umbrellas in a thousand invisible patterns. But this political announcement or advertisement, though more intelligent than 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 dance of a religious character. But I could imagine that it might sometimes seem 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 than their bodies. I could imagine that at some moments it might suck the 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 nor the 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 I went downstairs and wedged myself into the thick and thronging press. It surged through the gap by the gate, where men climbed lamp-posts and roared out speeches, and more especially recited national 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 other popular 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 representatives of the Zionists, to take away the Anti-Semitic colour from the meeting. But I think this unlikely; especially as it would have been pretty hard to take it away. It is more likely, I think, that the archaic Jews were really not unamused and perhaps not unsympathetic spectators; for the Zionist problem is complicated by a real quarrel in the Ghetto about Zionism. The old religious Jews do not welcome the new nationalist Jews; it would sometimes be hardly an exaggeration to say that one party stands for the religion without the nation, and the other for the nation without the religion. Just as the old agricultural Arabs hate the Zionists as the instruments of new Western business grab and sharp practice; so the old peddling and pedantic but intensely pious Jews hate the Zionists as the instruments of new Western atheism of free thought. Only I fear that when the storm breaks, such distinctions are swept away.
The storm was certainly rising. Outside the Jaffa Gate the road runs 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 stage properties, its one high-curtained window and balcony, with a sort of pole or flag-staff; for the place is official or rather municipal. Round it swelled the crowd, with its songs and poems and passionate rhetoric in a kind of crescendo, and then suddenly the curtain of the window rose like the curtain of the theatre, and we saw on that high balcony the red fez and the tall figure of the Mahometan Mayor of Jerusalem.
I did not understand his Arabic observations; but I know when 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 away in a grey morning; but there are perpetual mutterings of that storm. My point for the moment is that the exasperations come chiefly from the two extremes of the two great Semitic traditions of monotheism; and certainly not primarily from those poor Eastern Christians of whose fanaticism we have been taught to make fun. From time to time there are gleams of the extremities of Eastern fanaticism which are almost ghastly to Western feeling. They seem to crack the polish of the dignified leaders of the Arab aristocracy and the Zionist school of culture, and reveal a volcanic 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 doctors to let them die and hospitals to let them rot, ringing with the old unmistakable and awful accent that bade men dash their children against the stones. Another day the city would be placarded with posters printed in Damascus, telling the Jews who looked to Palestine for a national home that they should find it a national cemetery. And when these cries clash it is like the clash of those two crooked Eastern swords, that crossed and recrossed and revolved like blazing wheels, in the vanguard of the marching mob.
I felt the fullest pressure of the problem when I first walked round the 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 was laden with a storm that became the snowstorm; and it was the time at which the old Jews beat their hands and mourn over what are believed to be the last stones of the Temple. There was a movement in my own mind that was attuned to these things, and impressed by the 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 this chapter 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 of the Mosque of Omar. There is no place for the nation of the Jews but in the country of the Arabs. And these whispers came to me first not as intellectual conclusions upon the conditions of the case, of which I should have much more to say and to hope; but rather as hints of something immediate and menacing and yet mysterious. I felt almost a momentary impulse to flee from the place, like one who 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 crying from the turret and Israel wailing at the wall.
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CHAPTER VII
THE SHADOW OF THE PROBLEM
A traveller sees the hundred branches of a tree long before he is near enough to see its single and simple root; he generally sees the scattered or sprawling suburbs of a town long before he has looked upon the temple or the market-place. So far I have given impressions of the most motley things merely as they came, in chronological and not in logical order; the first flying vision of Islam as a sort of sea, with something both of the equality and the emptiness and the grandeur of its purple seas of sand; the first sharp silhouette of Jerusalem, like Mount St. Michael, lifting above that merely Moslem flood a crag still crowned with the towers of the Crusaders; the mere kaleidoscope of the streets, with little more than a hint of the heraldic meaning of the colours; a merely personal impression of 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 much of a hurry about tidying up. This has already been noted in the more obvious case, of all that religious art that bewildered the tourist with its churches full of flat and gilded ikons. Many a man has had the sensation of something as full as a picture gallery and as futile as a lumber-room, merely by not happening to know what is really of value, or especially in what way it is really valued. An Armenian or a Syrian might write a report on his visit to England, saying that our national and especially our naval heroes 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 of social status and utility implied in a public-house sign. He might not realise that the sign of Nelson could be hung on high everywhere, because the reputation of Nelson was high everywhere, not because it was low anywhere; that his bad portrait was really a proof of his good name. Yet the too rapid reformer may easily miss even the simple and superficial parallel between the wooden pictures 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 fond of religion as Englishmen of beer.
Nobody can do justice to these cults who has not some sympathy with the power of a mystical idea to transmute the meanest and most trivial objects with a kind of magic. It is easy to talk of superstitiously attaching importance to sticks and stones, but the whole poetry of life consists of attaching importance to sticks and stones; and not only to those tall sticks we call the trees or those large stones we call the mountains. Anything that gives to the sticks of our own furniture, or the stones of our own backyard, even a reflected or indirect divinity is good for the dignity of life; and this is often achieved by the dedication of similar and special things. At least we should desire to see the profane things transfigured by 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 bowls before the altar, and on every pot in Jerusalem should be written Holy 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 fact of the Armenians or some such people having been allowed to suspend a string of lamps from a Greek pillar by means of a nail, and their subsequent alarm when their nail was washed by the owners of the pillar; a sort of symbol that their nail had finally fallen into the hands of the enemy. It strikes us as odd that a nail should be so valuable or 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 or even for superstition, is obvious and has already been observed. But before leaving it, we may note that the same argument cuts the other way; I mean that we should not insolently impose our own ideas of 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 on the whole reasonable and sympathetic; but there is always a 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 must not 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 are really authorities, so they are the only judges of whether their novelties are really necessities. As I pointed out more than once to many of my friends in Jerusalem, we should be very much annoyed if artistic visitors from Asia took similar liberties in London. It would be bad enough if they proposed to conduct excavations in Pimlico or Paddington, without much reference to the people who lived there; but it would be worse if they began to relieve them of the mere utilitarianism of Chelsea Bridge or Paddington Station. Suppose an eloquent Abyssinian Christian were to hold up his hand and stop the motor-omnibuses from going down Fleet Street on the ground that the 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 are in the act of stepping into a taxi-cab, an excitable Coptic Christian were to leap from behind a lamp-post, and implore us to save the grand old growler or the cab called the gondola of London. I admit and enjoy the poetry of the hansom; I admit and enjoy the personality of the true cabman of the old four-wheeler, upon whose massive manhood descended something of the tremendous tradition of 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-book of 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 saw any 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 would be likely to agree. I have therefore confined the first section of this book to a mere series of such impressions, and left to the last section 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 me the determining historical events that make the problem what it is. Of these I will only say for the moment that, whether by a coincidence or for some deeper cause, I feel it myself to be a case of first thoughts being best; and that some further study of history served rather 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 fix the 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 reason for emphasising those contrasts, and for shunning the temptation to shut our eyes to them even considered as contrasts. It is necessary to insist that the contrasts are not easy to turn into combinations; that the red robes of Rome and the green scarves of Islam will not very easily fade into a dingy russet; that the gold of Byzantium and the brass of Babylon will require a hot furnace to melt them into any kind of amalgam. The reason for this is akin to what has already been said about Jerusalem as a knot of realities. It is especially a knot of popular realities. Although it is so small a place, or rather because it is so small 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 has grown large enough to have despots; indeed the despots are often much the more representative of the two. Now in a place so small as Jerusalem, what we call the rank and file really counts. And it is generally true, in religions especially, that the real enthusiasm or even fanaticism is to be found in the rank and file. In all intense religions it is the poor who are more religious and the rich who are more irreligious. It is certainly so with the creeds and causes that come to a collision in Jerusalem. The great Jewish population throughout the world did hail Mr. Balfour’s declaration with something almost of the tribal triumph they might have shown when the Persian conqueror broke the Babylonian bondage. It was rather the plutocratic princes of Jewry who long hung back and hesitated about Zionism. The mass of Mahometans really are ready to combine against the Zionists as they might have combined against the Crusades. It is rather the responsible Mahometan leaders who will naturally be found more moderate and diplomatic. This popular spirit may take a good or a bad form; and a mob may cry out 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 moderate admixture of Popery.” It shouts “Three cheers for Gladstone,” it does not shout “A gradual and evolutionary social tendency towards some ideal similar to that of Gladstone.” It would find it quite a difficult thing to shout; and it would find exactly the same difficulty with all the advanced formulae about nationalisation and internationalisation and class-conscious solidarity. No rabble could roar at the top of its voice the collectivist formula of “The nationalisation of all the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” The mob of Jerusalem is no exception 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 was a 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 idolatry of education. Their powers appeared in every crisis of the Great War, when a small group of pacifists and internationalists, a microscopic minority in every country, were yet constantly figuring as diplomatists and intermediaries and men on whose attitude great issues might depend. A man like Mr. Macdonald, not a workman nor a formal or real representative of workmen, was followed everywhere by the limelight; while the millions of workmen who worked and fought were out of focus and therefore looked like a fog. Just as such figures give a fictitious impression of unity between the crowds fighting for different flags and frontiers, so there are similar figures giving a fictitious unity to the crowds following different creeds. There are already Moslems who are Modernists; there have always been a ruling class of Jews who are Materialists. Perhaps it would be true to say about much of the philosophical controversy in Europe, that many Jews tend to be Materialists, but all tend to be Monists, though the best in the sense of being Monotheists. The worst are in a much grosser sense materialists, and have motives very 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 creeds as they do the chasm between countries. Everywhere they exalt the minority that is indifferent over the majority that is interested. Just as they would make an international congress out of the traitors of all nations, so they would make an ecumenical council out of the heretics of all religions.
Mild constitutionalists in our own country often discuss the 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 is difficult 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 all the poor Jews who do believe in Judaism and all the Mahometans who do believe in Mahometanism, not to mention so obscure a crowd as the Christians who do believe in Christianity. I feel I have more morally and even intellectually in common with these people, and even the religions of these people, than with the supercilious negations that make up the most part of what is called enlightenment. It is these masses whom we ought to consider everywhere; but it is especially these masses whom we must consider in Jerusalem. And the reason is in the reality I have described; that the place is like a Greek city or a medieval parish; it is sufficiently small and simple to be a democracy. This is not a university town full of philosophies; it is a Zion of the hundred sieges raging with 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 talk about self-determination; and that is determination. There is a great deal more difference than there is between most motions and amendments between the things for which a democracy will vote and the things on which a democracy is determined. You can take a vote among Jews and Christians and Moslems about whether lamp-posts should be painted green or portraits of politicians painted at all, and even their solid unanimity may be solid indifference. Most of what is called self-determination is like that; but there is 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 rather three 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 vague parliamentary election, to vote on the other side for a change, to choose afresh between two middle-class gentlemen, who look exactly alike and only 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 cannot be foreseen and certainly cannot be enforced. We cannot enrol these 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 only by being irreligious. That is why I willingly set down for the moment only 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 habit of thinking it a familiar country. It does no harm to put the facts in a fashion that seems disconnected; for the first fact of all is that they are disconnected. And the first danger of all is that we may allow some international nonsense or newspaper cant to imply that 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 learn in this strange land is that differences can be irreconcilable. And again the chief danger is that they may be persuaded that the wordy compromises of Western politics can reconcile them; that such abysses can 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 a certain point be workable in England; though there are signs that even in England that point is approaching or is past. But in any case we could 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 from ourselves and from each other we have at least partly succeeded. So in Ireland, where we have tried to make them agree with us and each other, we have made one never-ending nightmare.
We can no more subject the world to the English compromise than to the English climate; and both are things of incalculable cloud and twilight. We have grown used to a habit of calling things by the wrong names and supporting them by the wrong arguments; and even doing the right thing for the wrong cause. We have party governments which consist of people who pretend to agree when they really disagree. We have party debates which consist of people who pretend to disagree when they really agree. We have whole parties named after things they no longer support, or things they would never dream of proposing. We have a mass of meaningless parliamentary ceremonials that are no longer even symbolic; the rule by which a parliamentarian possesses a constituency but not a surname; or the rule by which he becomes a minister in order to cease to be a member. All this would seem the most superstitious and idolatrous mummery 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 Greek may or may not have a right to say he is Orthodox, but he means that he is Orthodox; in a very different sense from that in which a 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 because he is a Liberal, and a particular supporter of the party of liberty. Even in England indeed it will generally be found that there is something more clear and rational about the terms of theology than those of politics and popular science. A man has at least a more logical notion of what he means when he calls himself an Anglo-Catholic than when he calls himself an Anglo-Saxon. But the old Jew with the drooping ringlets, shuffling in and out of the little black booths of Jerusalem, would not condescend to 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 thunder and with miracles and with mighty battles out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage. In other words, he says something that means something, and something that he really means. One of the white Dominicans or brown Franciscans, from the great monasteries of the Holy City, may or may not be right in maintaining that a Papacy is necessary to the unity of Christendom. But he does not pass his life in proving that the Papacy is not a Papacy, as many of our liberal constitutionalists pass it in proving that the Monarchy is not a Monarchy. The Greek priests spend an hour on what seems to the sceptic mere meaningless formalities of the preparation of the Mass. But they would not spend a minute if they were themselves sceptics and thought them meaningless formalities, as most modern people do think of the formalities about Black Rod or the Bar of the House. They would be far less ritualistic than we are, if they cared as little for the Mass as we do for the Mace. Hence it is necessary for us to realise that these rude and simple worshippers, of all the different forms of worship, really would be bewildered by the ritual dances and elaborate ceremonial antics of John Bull, as by the superstitious forms and almost supernatural incantations of most of what we call plain English.
Now I take it we retain enough realism and common sense not to wish to transfer these complicated conventions and compromises to a land of such ruthless logic and such rending divisions. We may hope to reproduce our laws, we do not want to reproduce our legal fictions. We do not want to insist on everybody referring to Mr. Peter or Mr. Paul, as the honourable member for Waddy Walleh; because a retiring Parliamentarian has to become Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, we shall not insist on a retiring Palestinian official becoming Steward of the Moabitic Hundreds. But yet in much more subtle and more dangerous ways we are making that very mistake. We are transferring the fictions and even the hypocrisies of our own insular institutions from a place where they can 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 attempting as yet to solve it; because I think the danger is rather that we shall underrate the difficulties than overdo the description; that we shall too easily deny the problem rather than that we shall too severely criticise the solution. But I would conclude this chapter with one practical criticism which seems to me to follow directly from 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 entirely according to the ritual or routine of our own Parliament. It is a parliament 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 is different from what it is called, and even from what its name is called. It is death and destruction to send out these fictions into a foreign daylight, where they will be seen as things and not theories. And knowing all this, I cannot conceive the reason, or even the meaning, of sending out Sir Herbert Samuel as the British representative 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 contradiction to Zionism. Zionism, as I have always understood it, and indeed as I have always defended it, consists in maintaining that it would be better for all parties if Israel had the dignity and distinctive responsibility of a separate nation; and that this 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 in Palestine he cannot go there as a representative of England. If it is in England, he is so far a living proof that a Jew does not need a national home in Palestine. If there is any point in the Zionist argument at all, you have chosen precisely the wrong man and sent him to precisely the wrong country. You have asserted not the independence but the dependence of Israel, and yet you have ratified the worst insinuations about the dependence of Christendom. In reason you could not more strongly state that Palestine does not belong 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 is claiming it for the Jews. You combine all possible disadvantages of all possible courses of action; you run all the risks of the hard Zionist adventure, while actually denying the high Zionist ideal. You make a Jew admit he is not a Jew but an Englishman; even while you allow all his enemies to revile him because he is not an Englishman but 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 very enjoyable in London. There is a beauty in that brown twilight as well as in the clear skies of the Orient and the South. But it is simply horribly dangerous for a Londoner to carry his cloud of fog about with him, in the crystalline air about the 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 may consider 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 of Parliament who is supposed to represent certain miners in Yorkshire, or in twenty other more or less impersonal ways. But the people in Palestine will see only one aspect, and it will be a very personal aspect 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 willing to remain in London, and who is ready to represent Westminster. Meanwhile, for the masses of Moslems and Christians, he will only be the aggravation in practice of the very thing of which he is the denial in theory. He will not mean that Palestine is 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 unexpected reactions we shall produce if we thrust our own unrealities amid the red-hot realities of the Near East; it is like pushing a snow man into a furnace. I have no objection to a snow man as a part of our own 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 muddling of mistaken identity in their real and unique success in India. They may have been wrong or right but they were realistic about Moslems and Hindoos; they did not say Moslems were Hindoos, or send a highly intelligent 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 desirability of distinguishing between entirely different things. But I remembered that of late their tact had often failed them even in their chief success in India; and that every hour brought worse and wilder news of their failure in Ireland. I remembered that in the Early Victorian time, against the advice only of the wisest and subtlest of the Early Victorians, we had tied ourselves to the triumphant progress of industrial capitalism; and that progress 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 foreign policy seemed to be doing these irrational and random things. A sort of fear took hold of me; and it was not for the Holy Land that I feared.
A cold wave went over me, like that unreasonable change and chill with 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 I wondered if we had come to the end of compromise and comfortable nonsense, and if at last the successful stupidity of England would topple over like the successful wickedness of Prussia; because God is not mocked by the denial of reason any more than the denial of justice. And I fancied the very crowds of Jerusalem retorted on me words spoken to them long ago; that a great voice crying of old along the 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.
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CHAPTER VIII
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DESERT
There was a story in Jerusalem so true or so well told that I can see the actors in it like figures in coloured costumes on a lighted stage. It occurred during the last days of Turkish occupation, while the English advance was still halted before Gaza, and heroically enduring the slow death of desert warfare. There were German and Austrian elements present in the garrison with the Turks, though the three allies seem to have held strangely aloof from each other. In the Austrian group there was an Austrian lady, “who had some dignity or 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 indiscriminate charity for the poor and indiscriminate loathing for the Prussians. She was a nurse; she was also a nuisance. One day she was driving just outside the Jaffa Gate, when she saw one of those figures which 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 if he were going to be crowned king in the city; with his head lifted as if he saw apocalyptic stars in heaven, and a gesture at which the towers might fall. This man was ragged beyond all that moving rag-heap; he was as gaunt as a gallows tree, and the thing he 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 see in a vision, with his face of wood and his air of still trailing all the heraldic trappings of the Holy Roman Empire. This ambassador soon returned in state and said, “Your Serene High Sublimity (or whatever it is), he says he is cursing the English.” Her pity and patriotism were alike moved; and she again sent the plenipotentiary to discover why he cursed the English, or what tale of wrong or ruin at 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 general truth to which it testifies; that the Turkish rule was not popular even with Moslems, and that the German war was not particularly popular even with Turks. When all deductions are made for the patriot as a partisan, and his way of picking up only what pleases him, it remains true that the English attack was very widely regarded rather as a rescue than an aggression. And what complaint there was really was, in many cases, a complaint that the rescue did not come with a rush; that the English forces had to fall back when they had actually entered Gaza, and could not for long afterwards continue their advance on Jerusalem. This kind of 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 excusable than that of the poor Arab in Jerusalem; who cursed the English with the addition of being English themselves, who did it, not as he did, before one foreigner, but before all foreign opinion; and who advertised 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 can only be known to the staff on the spot; it is not a question of lack of water but of exactly how little water; not of the arrival 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 other end of the world; and these are the things which, for the soldier on the spot, make all the difference between jumping over a paling and jumping over a precipice. Even the latter, as the philosophic relativist will eagerly point out, is only a matter of degree. But this is a parenthesis; for the purpose with which I mentioned the anecdote is something different. It is the text of another and somewhat more elusive truth; some appreciation of which is necessary to a sympathy with the more profound problems of Palestine. And it might be expressed thus; it is a proverb that the Eastern methods seem to us slow; that the Arabs trail along on labouring camels while the Europeans flash by on motors or mono-planes. But there 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 crawling like a snail.
I have said that there is another side to the desert; though there is something queer in talking of another side to something so bare and big and oppressively obvious. But there is another side besides the big and bare truths, like giant bones, that the Moslem has found 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 and the days I spent there, being carted from camp to camp and giving what were courteously described as lectures. All I can say is that if those were lectures, I cannot imagine why everybody is not a lecturer. Perhaps the secret is already out; and multitudes of men in evening dress are already dotted about the desert, wandering in search of an audience. Anyhow in my own wanderings I found myself in the high narrow house of the Base Commandant at Kantara, the only house in the whole circle 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 Pavilion looked as if St. Paul’s Cathedral had come down there and littered; and that grey vista of countless cones looked rather as if the Great Pyramid had multiplied itself on the prolific scale of the herring. Nor was even such a foolish fancy without its serious side; for though these pyramids would pass, the plan of them was also among the mightiest of 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 more historic because it may never be seen again. As the dusk fell and 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 almost colourless common sense of the soldier. All that they said was objective; one felt that everything they mentioned was really a thing and not merely a thought; a thing like a post or a palm-tree. I think there is something in this of a sympathy between the English and 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 another of the proverbial prophecies about the term of Turkish power. They said there was an old saying that the Turk would never depart until the Nile flowed through Palestine; and this at least was 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 Christendom can do, and that Islam by itself would hardly care to do. I heard more afterwards of that water, which was eventually carried up 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 sense among the natives themselves of something magic in our machinery, and that in the main a white magic; the sense of all the more solid sort of 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 that an old Arab standing by said, in the plain and powerful phraseology of 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 Western work because the same conversation swerved slowly, as it were, to the Eastern side. These same men, who talked of all things as if they were chairs and tables, began to talk quite calmly of things more amazing than table-turning. They were as wonderful as if the 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 wire across the wastes, hearing of something that had that moment happened hundreds of miles away, and then coming upon a casual Bedouin who knew it already. They spoke of the whole tribes moving and on the march, upon news that could only come a little later by the swiftest wires of 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 to realities for that. That word, which will instantly leap to the lips of too many of my readers, strikes me as merely an evidence of two of our great modern improvements; the love of long words and the loss of common sense. It may have been telepathy, whatever that is; but a man must be almost stunned with stupidity if he is satisfied to say telepathy as if he were saying telegraphy. If everybody is satisfied about how it is done, why does not everybody do it? Why does not a cultivated clergyman in Cornwall make a casual remark to an old friend of his at the University of Aberdeen? Why does not a harassed commercial traveller in Barcelona settle a question by merely thinking about his business partner in Berlin? The common sense 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 all mysteries the modern world thinks most superstitious and senseless; the mystery of locality. It works back at last to the hardest of all the hard sayings of supernaturalism; that there is such a thing as 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 much the presiding genius. It is true that everywhere to-day a parade of the theory 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 the mysterious forces which men are once more studying. The words we now address to the unseen powers may be vague and universal, but the words they are said to address to us are parochial and even private. While the Higher Thought Centre would widen worship everywhere to a temple not made with hands, the Psychical Research Society is 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 who comes to expose the ghost-haunted churchyard has to haunt the churchyard like a ghost. There may be something faintly amusing about the idea of demi-gods with door-knockers and dinner tables, and demons, one may almost say, keeping the home fires burning. But the driving force of this dark mystery of locality is all the more indisputable because 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 concentrate in space as in time, or find in a spot something that corresponds to a crisis. And if this be felt everywhere, it is necessarily and abnormally felt in those alleged holy places and sacred spots. It is felt supremely in all those lands of the Near East which lie about the holy hill of Zion.
In these lands an impression grows steadily on the mind much too large for most of the recent religious or scientific definitions. The bogus heraldry of Haeckel is as obviously insufficient as any quaint old chronicle tracing the genealogies of English kings through the 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 mere score in the Victorian game of Scripture versus Science. Some much larger mystery veils the origins of man than most partisans on either side have realised; and in these strange primeval plains the traveller does realise it. It was never so well expressed as by one of the most promising of those whose literary possibilities were gloriously broken off by the great war; Lieutenant Warre-Cornish who left a strange and striking fragment, about a man who came to these lands with a mystical idea of forcing himself back against the stream of time into the very fountain of creation. This is a parenthesis; but before resuming the more immediate matter of the supernormal tricks of the tribes of the East, it is well to recognise this very real if much more general historic impression about the particular lands in which they lived. I have called it a historic impression; but it might more truly be called a prehistoric impression. It is best expressed in symbol by saying that 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 form of 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 well have happened whatever did happen; that through this Eastern gate, if any, entered whatever made and changed the world. Whatever else this narrow strip of land may seem like, it does really seem, to the spirit and almost to the senses, like the bridge that may have borne across archaic abysses the burden and the mystery of man. Here have been civilisations as old as any barbarism; to all appearance 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 fancy that all wild animals had once been tame. As I said elsewhere, all might be a runaway menagerie; the whale a cow that went swimming and 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 and Primitive Man and all the other random guesses from dubious bits of bone and stone. And the truth is some third thing, too tremendous to 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 another sense it is literally the other side. It is the other shore of that shifting and arid sea. Looking at it from the West and considering mainly the case of the Moslem, we feel the desert is but a barren border-land of Christendom; but seen from the other side it is the barrier between us and a heathendom far more mysterious and even monstrous than anything Moslem can be. Indeed it is necessary to realise this more vividly in order to feel the virtue of the Moslem movement. It belonged to the desert, but in one sense it was rather a clearance in the cloud that rests upon the desert; a rift of pale but clean light in volumes of vapour rolled on it like smoke from the strange lands beyond. It conceived a fixed hatred of idolatry, partly because its face was turned towards the multitudinous idolatries of the lands of sunrise; and as I looked Eastward I seemed to be conscious of the beginnings of that other world; and saw, like a forest of arms or a dream full of 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 us are not the romanticists but the realists. Every one can feel it in the work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and when I once remarked on his repulsive little masterpiece called “The Mark of the Beast,” to a rather cynical Anglo-Indian officer, he observed moodily, “It’s a beastly story. But those devils really can do jolly queer things.” It is but to take a commonplace example out of countless more notable ones to mention the many witnesses to the mango trick. Here again we have from time to time to weep over the weak-mindedness that hurriedly dismisses it as the practice of hypnotism. It is as if people were asked to explain how one unarmed Indian had killed three hundred men, and they said it was only the practice of human sacrifice. Nothing that we know as hypnotism will enable a man to alter the eyes in the heads of a huge crowd of total strangers; wide awake in broad daylight; and if it is hypnotism, it is something so appallingly magnified as to need a new magic to explain the explanation; certainly something that explains it better than a Greek word for sleep. But the impression of these special instances is but one example of a more universal impression of the Asiatic atmosphere; and that atmosphere itself is only an example of something vaster still for which I am trying to find words. Asia stands for something which the world in the West as well as the East is more and more feeling as a presence, and even a 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 breaking down 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 their own scientific world.
The agnostics have been driven back on agnosticism; and are already recovering from the shock. They find themselves 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 back of their minds a clear and consistent concept of their rather clockwork cosmos; that is why they could not admit the smallest speck of the supernatural into their clockwork. But to-day it is very hard for a scientific man to say where the supernatural ends or 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 question of defining or denying a simple central power, but of balancing the brain in a bewilderment of new powers which seem to overlap and might even conflict. Nature herself has become unnatural. The wind is blowing from the other side of the desert, not now with noble truism “There is no God but God,” but rather with that other motto 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 growing mysteriously in the middle of a room. Taking this image for the sake of argument, we can easily fancy a man half-conscious and convinced that he is delirious, or still partly in a dream, because he sees such 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 is nothing unnatural but this one hovering hallucination or optical delusion of green and red. Now that was very much the view taken of the Rose of Sharon, the mystical rose of the sacred tradition of Palestine, by any educated man about 1850, when the rationalism of the eighteenth century was supposed to have found full support in the science of the nineteenth. He had a sentiment about 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 inconsistent with everything else. It was one solitary and monstrous exception 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 miracles only in Palestine and only for one short period? It was a single and 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 or the 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 calculus of their three dimensions. Darwin was already arranging the animals in rank as neatly as a row of chairs, or Faraday the 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 discoveries were 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 bed next looks at the bedroom. Not only is the rose-bush still very obvious; but the other things are looking very odd. The perspective seems to have gone crooked; the walls seem to vary in measurement till the man thinks he is going mad. The wall-paper has a new pattern, of strange spirals instead of round dots. The table seems to have moved by itself across the room and thrown the medicine bottles out of the window. The telephone has vanished from the wall; the mirror does not reflect what is in front of it. The portrait of himself over the mantelpiece has a face that is not his own.
That is something like a vision of the vital change in the whole trend of natural philosophy in the last twenty or thirty years. It matters little whether we regard it as the deepening or the destruction of the scientific universe. It matters little whether we say that grander abysses have opened in it, or merely that the bottom has fallen out of it. It is quite self-evident that scientific men are at war with wilder and 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 impression one of common sense. It is really true that the perspective and dimensions of the man’s bedroom have altered; the disciples of Einstein will tell him that straight lines are curved and perhaps measure more 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 turned into the fourth dimension or something entirely different; and the telephone may fairly be said to have faded from view in favour of the invisible telepath. It is true that the pattern of the paper has changed, for the very pattern of the world has changed; we are told that it is not made of atoms like the dots but of electrons like the spirals. Scientific men of the first rank have 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 enough that few still pretend that is entirely done by the spiritualists. I am not dealing with doctrines but with doubts; with the mere fact that all these things have grown deeper and more bewildering. Some people really are throwing their medicine bottles out of the window; and some of them at least are working purely psychological cures of a sort that would once have been called miraculous 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 contact with 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 old dogmas 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 tune of Professor Einstein, even the law of gravity is behaving with lamentable levity.
And when the man looks at the portrait of himself he really does not see himself. He sees his Other Self, which some say is the opposite of his ordinary self; his Subconscious Self or his Subliminal Self, said to rage and rule in his dreams, or a suppressed self which hates him though it is hidden from him; or the Alter Ego of a Dual Personality. It is not to my present purpose to discuss the merit of these 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 been considerably 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 have in 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 into the face of a fiend. When he looks at the bedroom itself, in short, it becomes clearer and clearer that it is exactly this comfortable and 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 seems to smell as well as see; and he stretches forth his hand, and his finger bleeds upon a thorn.
It will not be altogether surprising if the story ends with the man recovering full consciousness, and finding he has been convalescing in a hammock in a rose-garden. It is not so very unreasonable when you come to 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 inconsistent with the other. Now the whole of the rationalistic doubt about the Palestinian legends, from its rise in the early eighteenth century out of the last movements of the Renascence, was founded on the fixity of facts. Miracles were monstrosities because they were against natural law, which was necessarily immutable law. The prodigies of the Old Testament or the mighty works of the New were extravagances because they were exceptions; and they were exceptions because there was a rule, and that an immutable rule. In short, there was no rose-tree growing out of the carpet of a trim and tidy bedroom; because rose-trees do not grow out of carpets in trim and tidy bedrooms. So far it seemed reasonable enough. But it left out one possibility; that a man can dream about a room as well as a rose; and that a man can doubt about a rule as well as 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 marvels as impossible, in face of the new marvels which they had to admit as possible. They were themselves dealing now with a number of unknown quantities; what is the power of mind over matter; when is matter 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 no longer watertight; that floods were coming in from somewhere in which they were already out of their depth, and down among very fantastical deep-sea fishes. They could hardly feel certain even about the fish that swallowed Jonah, when they had no test except the very true one 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 line at 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 gravity and the fable of the Ascension. They cannot all be made to see any such contrast between the levitation that is now discussed as a possibility 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 doubts and possibilities to have authority to define the difference. I say the more it knows of what seems to have happened, or what is said to have happened, in many modern drawing-rooms, the less it knows 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 the New Testament I am not directly concerned till the next chapter; and the matter here is a more general one. The truth is that through a thousand channels something has returned to the modern mind. It is not Christianity. On the contrary, it would be truer to say that it is paganism. In reality it is in a very special sense paganism; because it is polytheism. The word will startle many people, but not the people who know the modern world best. When I told a distinguished psychologist at Oxford that I differed from his view of the universe, he answered, “Why universe? Why should it not be a multiverse?” The essence of polytheism is the worship of gods who are not God; that is, who are not necessarily the author and the authority of all things. Men are feeling more and 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 really more like a daemon. He called his book God, the Invisible King; but the curious point was that he specially insisted that his God differed from other people’s God in the very fact that he was not a king. He was very particular in explaining that his deity did not rule 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 his one devoted worshipper; and that, as if in old Greece, a glad cry might 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 mean this disrespectfully, but on the contrary very sympathetically; I think it worthy of so great a man to appreciate and answer the general sense of a richer and more adventurous spiritual world around us. It is a great emancipation from the leaden materialism which weighed on men of imagination forty years ago. But my point for the moment is that the mode of the emancipation was pagan or even polytheistic, in the real philosophical sense that it was the selection of a single spirit, out of many there might be in the spiritual world. The point is that while Mr. Wells worships his god (who is not his creator or even necessarily his overlord) there is nothing to prevent Mr. William Archer, also emancipated, from adoring another god in another temple; or Mr. Arnold Bennett, should he similarly liberate his mind, from bowing down to a third god in a third temple. My imagination rather fails me, I confess, in evoking the image and symbolism of Mr. Bennett’s or Mr. Archer’s idolatries; and if I had to choose between the three, I should probably be found as an acolyte in the shrine of Mr. Wells. But, anyhow, the trend of all this is to polytheism, rather as it existed in the old civilisation of paganism.
There is the same modern mark in Spiritualism. Spiritualism also has the trend of polytheism, if it be in a form more akin to ancestor-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 merely describing the drift of the day; and it seems clear that it is towards the summoning of spirits to our aid whatever their position in the unknown 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 powers of 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 sneer at the identity of the word agnosticism with the word ignorance. On the contrary, I think ignorance the greater thing; for ignorance can be creative. And the thing it can create, and soon probably will create, is one of the lost arts of the world; a mythology.
In a word, the modern world will probably end exactly where the Bible begins. In that inevitable setting of spirit against spirit, or god against god, we shall soon be in a position to do more justice not only to the New Testament, but to the Old Testament. Our descendants may very possibly do the very thing we scoff at the old Jews for doing; grope for and cling to their own deity as one rising above rivals who seem to be equally real. They also may feel him not primarily as the sole or even the supreme but only as the best; and have to abide the miracles of ages to prove that he is also the mightiest. For them also he may at first be felt as their own, before he is extended to others; he also, from the collision with colossal idolatries and towering spiritual tyrannies, may emerge only as a God of Battles and a Lord of Hosts. Here between the dark wastes and the clouded mountain was fought out what must seem even to the indifferent a wrestle of giants driving the world out of its course; Jehovah of the mountains casting down Baal of the desert and Dagon of the sea. Here wandered and endured that strange and terrible and tenacious people who held high 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 beyond our understanding, had rightly chosen among the powers invisible, and found their choice a great god above all gods. So the future may suffer not from the loss but the multiplicity of faith; and its fate be far more like the cloudy and mythological war in 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 leading up to a lasting truth; and that it will once again be justified of all its children. What has survived through an age of atheism as the most indestructible would survive through an age of polytheism as the most indispensable. If among many gods it could not presently be 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 polytheist as sung by the neo-pagan poet, is a test which that incarnate mystery will abide the best. And however much or little our spiritual inquirers may lift the veil from their invisible kings, they will not find a vision more vivid than a man walking unveiled upon the mountains, seen of men and seeing; a visible god.
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CHAPTER IX
THE BATTLE WITH THE DRAGON
Lydda or Ludd has already been noted as the legendary birthplace of St. George, and as the camp on the edge of the desert from which, as it happened, I caught the first glimpse of the coloured fields of Palestine that looked like the fields of Paradise. Being an encampment of soldiers, it seems an appropriate place for St. George; and indeed it may be said that all that red and empty land has 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 innocent and imitative enthusiasm, made the Moslems also half-accept a sort of Christian mythology, and make an abstract hero of St. George. It is said that Coeur de Lion on these very sands first invoked the soldier saint to bless the English battle-line, and blazon his cross on the English banners. But the name occurs not only in the stories of the victory of Richard, but in the enemy stories that led up to the great victory of Saladin. In that obscure and violent quarrel which let loose the disaster of Hattin, when the Grand Master of the Templars, Gerard the Englishman from Bideford in Devon, drove with demented heroism his few lances against a host, there fell among those radiant fanatics one Christian warrior, who had made with his single sword such a circle of the slain, that the victorious Moslems treated even his dead body as something supernatural; and bore it away with them with honour, saying it was the body of 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 more fantastic story of St. George and the Dragon. The symbolic struggle between man and monster might very well take place somewhere where the green culture of the fields meets the red desolation of the desert. As a matter of fact, I dare say, legend locates the duel itself somewhere 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 it here 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 paradox has already been touched on in the last chapter about polytheistic spirits or superstitions such as surrounded the Old Testament, but it is yet more true of the criticisms and apologetics surrounding the New Testament. And the paradox is this; that we never find our 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 we are 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 abrupt as a refutation. That is the point about the wireless telegraphy or wordless telepathy of the Bedouins. A supernatural trick in a dingy tribe wandering in dry places is not the sort of supernaturalism we 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 mere fairy-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 to the conclusion that there probably was such a person as St. George, in spite of all the nonsense about dragons and the chimera with wings and 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 that early Christianity, so far from being a religion of pacifists, was largely a religion of soldiers. Anyhow he thinks St. George himself 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 of the legendary combat; and finds comparatively few or faint traces of the personality of St. George. But suppose he does find, on that very field of combat, the bones of a gigantic monster unlike every other creature except the legendary dragon. Or suppose he only finds ancient Eastern sculptures and hieroglyphics representing maidens, being sacrificed to such a monster, and making it quite clear that even within historic times one of those sacrificed was a princess. It is surely clear that he will be considerably impressed by this confirmation, not of the part he did believe, but actually of the part he did not believe. He has not found what he expected but 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. George and the Dragon.
It is needless to inform the reader, I trust, that I do not think this particular case in the least likely; or that I am only using it for the sake of lucidity. Even as it stands, it would not necessarily make a man believe the traditional story, but it would make him guess that it was some sort of tradition of some sort of truth; that there was something in it, and much more in it than even he himself had imagined. And the point of it would be precisely that 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 had taught him the fantastic part. He will certainly conclude that the whole story is very much more valid than anybody has supposed. Now as I have already said, it is not in the least likely that this will happen touching this particular tale of Palestine. But this is precisely what really has happened touching the 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 only ornamental symbols; and by the right of whose tragedy even St. George’s Cross does not belong to St. George. It is not likely to 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 Christ and His mastery of the powers of darkness, that this very paradox has proved itself a fact.
Going down from Jerusalem to Jericho I was more than once moved by a flippant and possibly profane memory of the swine that rushed down a steep place into the sea. I do not insist on the personal parallel; for whatever my points of resemblance to a pig I 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 to the Dead Sea does really involve rushing down a steep place. Indeed it gives a strange impression that the whole of Palestine is one single steep place. It is as if all other countries lay flat under the sky, but this one country had been tilted sideways. This gigantic gesture of geography or geology, this sweep as of a universal landslide, is the sort of thing that is never conveyed by any maps or books or even pictures. All the pictures of Palestine I have seen are descriptive details, groups of costume or 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 roads among ribbed and columned cliffs; but the roads below soon failed us altogether; and the car had to tumble like a tank over rocky banks and into empty river-beds, long before it came to the sinister and discoloured landscapes of the Dead Sea. And the distance looks far 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 gets out beyond Jordan in the wild country of the Shereef he can still look back and see, small and faint as if in the clouds, the spire of 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 mystery of that larger sea. I even had the fancy that one might fish for 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 text for the central controversy of the Victorian Age between Christianity and criticism. The two champions were two of the greatest men of the nineteenth century; Huxley representing scientific scepticism and Gladstone scriptural orthodoxy. The scriptural champion was universally regarded as standing for the past, if not for the dead past; and the scientific champion as standing for the future, if not the final judgment of the world. And yet the future has been entirely different to anything that anybody expected; and the final judgment may yet reverse all the conceptions of their contemporaries and even of themselves. The philosophical position now 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 world was going, and the probable position of the next generation. What he thought indisputable is disputed; and what he thought dead is rather too much alive.
Huxley was not only a man of genius in logic and rhetoric; he was a man of a very manly and generous morality. Morally he deserves much more sympathy than many of the mystics who have supplanted him. But they have supplanted him. In the more mental fashions of 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 it as his purpose to purge the Christian ideal, which he thought self-evidently sublime, of the Christian demonology, which he thought self-evidently ridiculous. And yet if we take any typical man of the next generation, we shall very probably find Huxley’s sublime thing scoffed at, and Huxley’s ridiculous thing taken seriously. I imagine a very typical child of the age succeeding Huxley’s may be found in Mr. George Moore. He has one of the most critical, appreciative and atmospheric talents of the age. He has lived in most of 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 it with peculiar pomp and pride; he would consider himself the freest of all freethinkers. Let us take him as a type and a test of what has really 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, 0 man, that which is good”; and asked scornfully whether anybody was ever likely to suggest that justice was worthless or that mercy was unlovable, and whether anything would diminish the distance between ourselves and 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 admired for 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 somewhat varying ideals were only interesting because they had belonged to himself. Some of this, it is true, was only in the Confessions of a Young Man; but it is the whole point here that they were then the confessions of a young man, and that Huxley’s in comparison were the confessions of an old man. The trend of the new time, in very varying degrees, was tending to undermine, not merely the Christian demonology, not merely the Christian theology, not merely the Christian religion, but definitely the Christian ethical ideal, which had seemed to the great agnostic as secure as the stars.
But while the world was mocking the morality he had assumed, it was bringing back the mysticism he had mocked. The next phase of 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 even comic is the reality of the supernatural, saying that he knew a farmer whom the fairies had dragged out of bed and beaten. Now suppose Mr. Yeats had told Mr. Moore, then moving in this glamorous atmosphere, another story of the same sort. Suppose he had said that the farmer’s pigs had fallen under the displeasure of some magician of the sort he celebrates, who had conjured bad fairies into the quadrupeds, so that they went in a wild dance down to the village pond. Would Mr. Moore have thought that story any more incredible than the other? Would he have thought it worse than a thousand other things that a modern mystic may lawfully believe? Would he have risen to his feet and 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 improbable than hundreds of psychic fantasies or farces for which there is really a good deal of evidence. He would be ready to entertain the idea if he found it anywhere except in the New Testament. As for the more vulgar and universal fashions that have followed after the Celtic movement, they have left such trifles far behind. And they have been directed not by imaginative artists like Mr. Yeats or even Mr. Moore, but by solid scientific students like Sir William Crookes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I find it easier to imagine an evil spirit agitating the legs of a pig than a good spirit agitating the legs of a table. But I will not here enter into the argument, since I am only trying to describe the atmosphere. Whatever has happened in more recent years, what Huxley expected has certainly not happened. There has been a revolt against Christian morality, and where there has not been a return of Christian mysticism, it has been a return of the 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 devils worse 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 very last element in the Christian story that would ever have been selected by the enlightened Christian apologist. Gladstone would defend 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 finding an unexpected support, and finding it in an unexpected quarter. It is not theological but psychological study that has brought us back into this dark underworld of the soul, where even identity seems 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 almost as near to a new supernaturalism, and things quite as incredible to the old rationalism. Dual personality is not so very far from diabolic possession. And if the dogma of subconsciousness allows 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 it cannot have an underground passage leading anywhere else in the world. He cannot say he knows nothing whatever about its size or shape or appearance, except that it certainly does not contain a relic of the finger-joint of St. Catherine of Alexandria, or that it certainly is not haunted by the ghost of King Herod Agrippa. If there is any sort of legend or tradition or plausible probability which says that it is, he cannot call a thing impossible where he is not only ignorant but even unconscious. It comes back therefore to the same reality, that the old compact cosmos depended on a compact 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 say that 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 we are in very deep waters, whether or no we have rushed down a steep place to fall into them.
It will be noted that what we really lack here is not the 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 thing diabolic is hardly an argument against the existence of diabolism. It is still more clearly the case when we go outside the sphere of science into its penumbra in literature and conversation. There is a mass of fiction and fashionable talk of which it may truly be said, that what we miss in it is not demons but the power to 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 found the Dragon. We have found in the desert, as I have said, the bones of the monster we did not believe in, more plainly than the footprints of the hero we did. We have found them not because we expected to find them, for our progressive minds look to the promise of something much brighter and even better; not because we wanted to 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 really thought it impossible so far as we ever thought of it at all. We have found them because they are there; and we are bound to come on them even by falling over them. It is Huxley’s method that has upset Huxley’s conclusion. As I have said, that conclusion itself is completely reversed. What he thought indisputable 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 style of Gladstone, but rather by obstinate objective curiosity according to the advice of Huxley. We in the West have “followed our reason as far as it would go,” and our reason has led us to things that nearly 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 our unreason as far as it will go, seeing whether the brain will crack under the conception that space is curved, or that parallel straight lines always meet. And the science of Freud would make it essentially 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 that he knows nothing. That is exactly what he does not know. The floor has fallen out of his mind and the abyss below may contain subconscious certainties as well as subconscious doubts. He is too ignorant even to ignore; and he must confess himself an agnostic about whether he is an agnostic.
That is the coil or tangle, at least, which the dragon has reached even in the scientific regions of the West. I only describe the tangle; I do not delight in it. Like most people with a taste for 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 peculiar realms of reason; especially the European realms of the motor and the telephone. When we have a man like Mr. William Archer, lecturing mystically on dreams and psychoanalysis, and saying it is clear that God did not make man a reasonable creature, those acquainted with the traditions and distinguished record of that dry and capable Scot will consider the fact a prodigy. I confess it never occurred to me that Mr. Archer was of such stuff as 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 chanced to stray into those orient hills where those occult streams have always risen, and especially in this land that lies between 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 between two worlds, where the rocks stand out stark like the very bones of the Dragon.
As I went down that sloping wall or shoulder of the world from the Holy City on the mountain to the buried Cities of the Plain, I seemed to see more and more clearly all this Western evolution 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 through the desert, as described in the last chapter, about the gods of Asia and of the ancient dispensation, and I found it led me along these hills to a sort of vista or vision of the new dispensation and 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 what was undoubtedly, when thus considered, one tribe among many tribes worshipping one god among many gods, but it is quite as much an evident external fact that the god has become God. Still stated objectively, the story is that the tribe having this religion produced a new prophet, claiming to be more than a prophet. The old religion killed the new prophet; but the new prophet killed the old religion. He died to destroy it, and it died in destroying him. Now it may be reaffirmed equally realistically that there was nothing normal about the case or its consequences. The things that took part in that tragedy have never been the same since, and have never been like 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 perish like Babylon and Assyria. It went through a most extraordinary remorse amounting to madness and resuscitation into sanity, which is equally strange in history whether it seems as ghastly as 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 we regard them as a reconquest by Christendom or a conspiracy of Jews or a part of the lingering quarrel with Moslems, are alike the effect of forces gathered and loosened in that one mysterious moment in the history of the city. They equally proclaim the paradox of 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 among those 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 modern man saying that Christ is only a thing like Atys or Mithras, when the next moment he is reproaching Christianity for not following Christ? He does not suddenly lose his temper and talk about our most unmithraic conduct, as he does (very justly as a rule) about our most unchristian conduct. We do not find a group of ardent young agnostics, in the middle of a great war, tried as traitors for their extravagant interpretation of remarks attributed to Atys. It is improbable that Tolstoy wrote a book to prove that all modern ills could be cured by literal obedience to all the orders of Adonis. We do not find wild Bolshevists calling themselves Mithraic Socialists as many of them call themselves Christian Socialists. Leaving orthodoxy and even sanity entirely on one side, the very heresies and insanities of our time prove that after nearly two thousand years the issue is 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 Mithras as 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 for those to whom it is little more than a legend, has another relevancy 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 generally took pains to exalt his humanity. Of the nineteenth-century revolutionists it is really an understatement to say that they exalted him as a man; for indeed they rather exalted him as a superman. That is to say, many of them represented him as a man preaching a decisively superior and ever strange morality, not only in advance of his age but practically in advance of our age. They made of his mystical counsels of perfection a sort of Socialism or Pacifism or Communism, which they themselves still see rather as something that ought to be or that will be; the extreme limit of universal love. I am not discussing here whether they are right or not; I say they have in fact found in the same figure a type of humanitarianism and the care for human happiness. Every one knows the striking and sometimes staggering utterances that do really support and illustrate this side of the teaching. Modern idealists are naturally moved by such things as the intensely poetic paradox about the lilies of the field; which for them has a 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 humanistic view of the case would allow of such criticism without incongruity, have not made some study of the purely poetical or oratorical structure of such passages. Certainly there are few finer examples of the swift architecture 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 pavilions and palaces and the great name of the national history; and then with a turn of the hand like a gesture of scorn, the change to the grass that 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 a celestial flight of stairs, a ladder of imaginative logic. Indeed this a fortiori, and this power of thinking on three levels, is (I may remark 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 surface goes beyond a line; for instance, that the citizen is infinitely above all ranks, and yet the soul is infinitely above the citizen. But we are only concerned at the moment with the sides of this many-sided mystery which happen to be really in sympathy with the modern mood. Judged even by our modern tests of emancipated art or ideal economics, it is admitted that Christ understood all that is rather crudely embodied in Socialism or the Simple Life. I purposely insist first on this optimistic, I might almost say this pantheistic or even this pagan aspect of the Christian Gospels. For it is only when we understand that Christ, considered merely as a prophet, can be and is a popular leader in the love of natural things, that we can feel that tremendous and tragic energy of his testimony to an ugly reality, the existence of unnatural things. Instead of taking a text as I have done, take a whole Gospel and read it steadily and honestly and straight through at a sitting, and you will 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 of the flowers of the battle-field; but he came out to battle. And if most of his words mean anything they do mean that there is at our very feet, like a chasm concealed among the flowers, an unfathomable evil.
In short, I would here only hint delicately that perhaps the mind which admittedly knew much of what we think we know about ethics and economics, knew a little more than we are beginning to know about psychology and psychic phenomena. I remember reading, not without amusement, a severe and trenchant article in the Hibbert Journal, in which Christ’s admission of demonology was alone thought enough to dispose of his divinity. The one sentence of the article, which I cherish in my memory through 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 line of 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 Omniscience on the problem of evil might be allowed, even by an agnostic, to be a little difficult to discover. Of Christ in the Gospels and in modern life I will merely for the moment say this; that if he was God, as the critic put it, it seems possible that he knew the 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 nobody can imagine; and we can only say that if it reveals demons and their name is Legion, we can hardly be much surprised now. But at any rate the 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 asked by 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 scenery through which I went as I thought about these things; a sense of silent catastrophe and fundamental cleavage in the deep division of the cliffs and crags. They were all the more profoundly moving, because my sense of them was almost as subconscious 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 landscape that might well awaken anybody. It might awaken a man sleeping; but he would think he was still in a nightmare. It might wake the dead, but they would probably think they were in hell. Halfway down the slope the hills had taken on a certain pallor which had about 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 which contrasted with wild sky-line. Perhaps we are accustomed to the contrary condition of the clouds moving and mutable and the hills solid and serene; but anyhow there seemed something of the making of a new world about the quiet of the skies and the cold convulsion of the landscape. But if it was between chaos and creation, it was creation by God or 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 mind woke up from its meditations. One can only say that the whole landscape was 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 waves or 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 remembered its name, or the ancient tradition about its nature. Then even the green plague-spots failed, and everything seemed to 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 sea below the seas on which men sail. Seas move like clouds and fishes float like birds above the level of the sunken land. And it is here that tradition has laid the tragedy of the mighty perversion of the imagination of man; the monstrous birth and death of abominable things. I say such things in no mood of spiritual pride; such things are hideous not because they are distant but because they 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 darkness of the brain of man, I know not why He came. Certainly it was 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 tale resolves itself into war with the Dragon who is wasting fairyland. I will not enter on the theology behind the symbol; but I am 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 said to 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 the Gospel 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 four corners of the earth, and turned again to acclaim their master, he did not say in that hour of triumph, “All are aspects of one harmonious whole” or “The universe evolves through progress to 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 rock and cleft something of the swiftness of such a thunderbolt. What I saw seemed not so much a scene as an act; as when abruptly Michael barred the passage of the Lord of Pride. Below me all the empire of evil was splashed and scattered upon the plain, like a wine-cup shattered into a star. Sodom lay like Satan, flat upon the floor of the world. And far away and 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.
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CHAPTER X
THE ENDLESS EMPIRE
One of the adventures of travel consists, not so much in finding that popular sayings are false, as that they mean more than they say. We cannot appreciate the full force of the phrase until we have seen the fact. We make a picture of the things we do not know out of the things we know; and suppose the traveller’s tale to mean no more abroad than it would at home. If a man acquainted only with English churches is told about certain French churches that they are much frequented, he makes an English picture. He imagines a definite dense crowd of people in their best clothes going all together at eleven o’clock, and all coming back together to lunch. He does not picture the peculiar impression he would gain on the spot; of chance people going in and out of the church all day, sometimes for quite short periods, as if it were a sort of sacred inn. Or suppose a man knowing only English beer-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 top of 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 Germany that I am glad to be able to pay a passing tribute to those more generous German traditions which we hope may revive and make Germany once more a part of Christendom. I merely give it as an instance of the way in which things we have all heard of, like church-going or beer-drinking, in foreign lands, mean much more, and something much more special, than we should infer from our own land. Now this is true of a phrase we have all heard of deserted cities or temples in the Near East: “The Bedouins camp in the ruins.” When I have read a hundred times that Arabs camp in some deserted town or temple near the Nile or the Euphrates, I always thought of gipsies near some place like Stonehenge. They would make their own rude shelter near the stones, perhaps sheltering behind them to light a fire; and for the rest, generations of gipsies might camp there without making much difference. The thing I saw more than once in Egypt and Palestine was much more curious. It was as if the gipsies set to work to refurnish Stonehenge and make it a commodious residence. It was as if they spread a sort of giant umbrella over the circle of stones, and elaborately hung curtains between them, so as to turn the old Druid temple into a sort of patchwork pavilion. In one sense there is much more vandalism, and in another sense much more practicality; but it is a practicality that always stops short of the true creative independence of going off and building a house of their own. That is the attitude of the Arab; and it runs through all his history. Noble as is his masterpiece of the Mosque of 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 fictions or even shams.
I frequently saw old ruined houses of which there only remained two walls of stone, to which the nomads had added two walls of canvas making an exact cube in form with the most startling incongruity in colour. He needs the form and he does not mind the incongruity, nor does he mind the fact that somebody else has done the solid part and he has only done the ramshackle part. You can say that he is nobly superior to jealousy, or that he is without artistic ambition, or that he is too much of a nomad to mind living half in somebody else’s house and half in his own. The real quality is probably too subtle for any simple praise or blame; we can only say that there is 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 Arab conquests and Arab culture in all its ingenuity and insufficiency. That is the note of these nomads in all the things in which they have succeeded and failed. In that sense they are constructive and in that sense unconstructive; in that sense artistic and in that sense inartistic; in that sense practical and in that sense unpractical; in that sense cunning and in that sense innocent. The curtains they would hang round Stonehenge might be of beautifully selected colours. The banners they waved from Stonehenge might be defended with glorious courage and enthusiasm. The prayers they recited in Stonehenge might be essentially worthy of human dignity, and certainly a great improvement on its older associations of human sacrifice. All this is 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 Salisbury or 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 a subtle manner superficial. When a man first sees the Eastern deserts, he sees this influence as I first described it, very present and powerful, almost omnipresent and omnipotent. But I fancy that to me and to others it is partly striking only because it is strange. Islam is so different to Christendom that to see it at all is at first like entering a new world. But, in my own case at any rate, as the strange colours became more customary, and especially as I saw more of the established seats of history, the cities and the framework of 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 yet very 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 houses of gold full of hard highly coloured pictures, I fancied it came to me. It was the Empire. And certainly not the raid of Asiatic bandits we call the Turkish Empire. The thing which had caught my eye in that coloured interior was the carving of a two-headed eagle in 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 well suggest, the suggestion that the Russian Church was far too much of an Established 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 Rome and of Byzantium; the one head looking to the west and the other to the east, as if it spread its wings from the sunrise to the sunset. Unless I am mistaken, it was only associated with Russia as late as Peter the Great, though it had been the badge of Austria as the representative of the Holy Roman Empire. And what I felt brooding over that shrine and that landscape was something older not only than Turkey or Russia but than Austria itself. I began to understand a sort of evening light that lies over Palestine and Syria; a sense of smooth ruts of custom such as are said to give a dignity to the civilisation of China. I even understood a sort of sleepiness about the splendid and handsome Orthodox priests moving fully robed about the streets. They were not aristocrats but officials; still moving with the mighty routine of some far-off official system. In so far as the eagle was an 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 With the captives dragged behind him and the eagles in the van.
That is the rigid reality that still underlay the light mastery of 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 walls of stone. This also was far too great a thing for facile praise or 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 not always 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 indeed nobody would remember Byzantium if it were not for Rome. The more I saw of a hundred little things the more my mind revolved round 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 only called the Latin Patriarch, as if he came from any little town in Latium. The truth behind this confusion is the truth about five hundred very vital years, which are concealed even from cultivated Englishmen by two vague falsehoods; the notion that the Roman Empire was merely decadent 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 title of decay from that Christian city, for surely it was yet more stiff and sterile when it had become a Moslem city. I am not so exacting as to ask any one to popularise such a word as “Constantinopolitan.” But it would surely be a better word for stiffness and sterility to call it Stamboulish. But for the Moslems and other men of the Near East what counted about Byzantium was that 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 be speaking as a Greek, he was ruling as a Roman. Its critics in these 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 bishops degenerate dreamers or dingy outcasts, he called them, with a sounder historical instinct, “The monks of the imperial race.” The survival of the word merely means that even when the imperial city fell behind them, they did not surrender their claim to defy all Asia in the name of the Christian Emperor. That is but one example out of twenty, but that is why in this distant place to this day the Greeks who are separated from the see of 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 pictures or gardens or roads or universities were made by the Teutonic race 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 neighbourhood of Potsdam, or did ten Hansa towns compete to be the birthplace of Homer? Perhaps they do by this time; but their local illusion is no longer largely shared. Anyhow it seems strange that the roads of the Romans should be due to the inspiration of the Teutons; and that parliaments should begin in Spain because they came from Germany. If I looked about in these parts for a local emblem like that of the eagle, I might very well find it in the lion. The lion is common enough, of course, in Christian art both hagiological and heraldic. Besides the cavern of Bethlehem of which I shall speak presently, is the cavern of St. Jerome, where he lived with that real or legendary lion who was drawn by the delicate humour of Carpaccio and a hundred other religious painters. That it should appear in Christian art is natural; that it should appear in Moslem art is much more singular, seeing that Moslems are in theory forbidden so to carve images of living things. Some say the Persian Moslems are less particular; but whatever the explanation, two lions of highly heraldic appearance are carved over that Saracen gate which Christians call the gate of St. Stephen; and the best judges seem to agree that, like so much of the Saracenic shell of Zion, they were partly at least copied from the shields and crests of the Crusaders.
And the lions graven over the gate of St. Stephen might well be the 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 had itself been drawn. The two lions are pacing, passant as the heralds would 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 of the conventional fancy of Moslem decoration, it was only because the Romans had previously brought the lion northward to the cold seas and the savage forests. The image of the lion came from north to south, only because the idea of the lion had long ago come from south to north. The Christian had a symbolic lion he had never seen, and the Moslem had a real lion that he refused to draw. For we could deduce from the case of this single creature the 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 Norman or Angevin shield now quartered in the Royal Arms of England. They may have been copied, directly or indirectly, from that great Angevin King of England whose title credited him with the heart of a lion. They may have in some far-off fashion the same ancestry as the boast or 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 more than of a tiger? Why do your patriotic cartoons threaten the world with the wrath of the British Lion; it is really as strange as if they warned 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 Scandinavian piracy, 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 name of John Bull is foreign. The surname comes through France from Rome; and the Christian name comes through Rome from Palestine. If there had really been any justification for the Teutonic generalisation, we should expect the surname to be “ox” and not “bull”; and we should expect the hero standing as godfather to be Odin or Siegfried, and not the prophet who lived on locusts in the wilderness of Palestine or the mystic 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 ultimately because that blue sea has run like a blue thread through all the tapestries 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 obviously even truer of our use of the word “lion.” The later emblem is enough to 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 of the land, but more especially the sea in the middle of all the lands that mattered most to civilisation. One of these, and the one that in the long run has mattered most of all, was Palestine.
In this lies the deepest difference between a man like Richard the Lion Heart and any of the countless modern English soldiers in Palestine who have been quite as lion-hearted as he. His superiority was not moral but intellectual; it consisted in knowing where he was and why he was there. It arose from the fact that 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 Richard quite natural to go from one edge of it that happened to be called England 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 regard himself not merely as conquering but as re-conquering a realm. He was not like a man attacking total strangers on a hitherto undiscovered island. He was not opening up a new country, or giving his name to a new continent, and he could boast none of those ideals of imperial innovation which inspire the more enlightened pioneers, who exterminate tribes or extinguish republics 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 sentiments of one stepping on a new and nameless soil. Disregarding any dim and lingering legends among the natives, he may then have the honour of calling Sinai by the name of Mount Higgins, or marking on a new map the site of Bethlehem with the name of Brownsville. But King Richard, adventurous as he was, could not experience the full freshness of this sort of adventure. He was not riding into Asia thus romantically 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 be considered later. I am primarily speaking of the Empire as a pagan and political matter; and it is easy to see what was the meaning of the 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 anything that could be understood by a man standing as I have imagined myself standing, in the official area of Byzantium. When I have said 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 real revolution and novelty have come between them and their ancient sun. This may seem an enigma and a paradox; seeing that here a foreign religion has successfully fought and ruled. But indeed the enigma is also the explanation. In the East the continuity of culture has only been interrupted by negative things that Islam has done. In the West it has been interrupted by positive things that Christendom itself has done. In the West the past of Christendom has its perspective blocked up by its own creations; in the East it is a true perspective of interminable corridors, with round Byzantine arches and proud Byzantine pillars. That, I incline to fancy, is the real difference that a man come from the west of 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 absence of 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 should be 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 stiffening and growing sterile, and even the early successes of Islam may not have 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 felt the earth shaking with the march of mobs; and behind them came the 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 hope crying out in the old Roman tongue “Id Deus vult,” Rome was risen from the dead.
Almost any traveller could select out of the countless things that 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 in the most random fashion; and the man to whom it comes can only speak for himself without any attempt at a critical comparison with others. In this sense I may say that the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem contains something impossible to describe, yet driving me beyond expression to a desperate attempt at description. The church is entered through a door so small that it it might fairly be 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 wall was pierced in this way to prevent the appearance of a camel during divine service, but even that explanation would only repeat the 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 been turned into a fortress, windows are bricked up and walls thickened in some or all of its thousand years of religious war. In the blank spaces above the little doorway hung in old times that strange mosaic of the Magi which once saved the holy place from destruction, in the strange interlude between the decline of Rome and the rise of Mahomet. For when the Persians who had destroyed Jerusalem rode out in triumph to the village of Bethlehem, they looked up and saw above 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 tradition containing an eternal truth, had drawn the three wise men with the long robes and high head-dresses of Persia. The worshippers of the sun had come westward for the worship of the star. But whether that part of the church were bare and bald as it is now 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 twilight to a grey daylight, the first impression is that of two rows of towering pillars. They are of a dark red stone having much of the appearance of a dark red marble; and they are crowned with 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 altar, is the dark stairway that descends under the canopies of rock to the stable where Christ was born.
Of all the things I have seen the most convincing, and as it were crushing, were these red columns of Constantine. In explanation of the sentiment there are a thousand things that want saying and cannot be said. Never have I felt so vividly the great fact of our history; that the Christian religion is like a huge bridge across a boundless sea, which alone connects us with the men who made the world, and yet have utterly vanished from the world. To put it curtly and very crudely on this point alone it was possible to sympathise with a Roman and not merely to admire him. All his pagan remains are but sublime fossils; for we can never know the life that was in them. We know that here and there was a temple to Venus or there an altar to Vesta; but who knows or pretends to know what he really felt about Venus or Vesta? Was a Vestal Virgin like a Christian Virgin, or something profoundly different? Was he quite serious about Venus, like a diabolist, or merely frivolous about Venus, like a Christian? If the spirit was different from ours we 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 images in the end.
In any case I can never recapture in words the waves of sympathy with strange things that went through me in that twilight 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 triumph through the whole world; here in the evening of its days it came trailing in all its panoply in the pathway of the three kings. For it came following not only a falling but a fallen star and one that dived before them into a birthplace darker than a grave. And the lord of the laurels, clad in his sombre crimson, looked down into that darkness, and then looked up, and saw that all the stars in his own sky were dead. They were deities no longer but only a brilliant dust, scattered down the vain void of Lucretius. The stars were as stale as they were strong; they would never die for they had never lived; they were cursed with an incurable immortality that was but the extension of mortality; they were chained 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 and seemingly fixed mood of nearly all the ancients. Only above the black hole 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 beside the plain stable of the Nativity. But it seems strange that they always rebuke it as if it were a blind vulgarity like the red plush 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 an artistic contrast. Indeed it is an insensibility of a somewhat tiresome kind, which can often be noticed in those sceptics who make a science of folk-lore. The mark of them is that they fail to see the importance of finding the upshot or climax of a tale, even when it is a fairy-tale. Since the old devotional doctors and designers were never tired of insisting on the sufferings of the holy poor to the point of squalor, and simultaneously insisting on the sumptuousness of the subject kings to the point of swagger, it would really seem not entirely improbable that they may have been conscious of the contrast themselves. I confess this is an insensibility, not to say stupidity, in the sceptics and simplifiers, which I find 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 of the story, considered as a story or even considered as a lie. And a man who sees the rags and the royal purple as a clumsy inconsistency is merely missing the meaning of a deliberate design. He is like a man who should hear the story of King Cophetua and the beggar maid and say doubtfully that it was hard to recognise it as really a mariage de convenance; a phrase which (I may remark in parenthesis but not 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 maid conventionally a suitable match; and nobody would ever have thought the story worth telling if it had been. It is like saying that 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 inconsistent with 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 even say the joke of it. I do not object to his rejecting the story as a tall story; but I find it deplorable when he cannot see the point or end or upshot of the tall story, the very pinnacle or spire of that sublime tower.
This dull type of doubt clouds the consideration of many sacred 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 contrast which Christians in ten thousand hymns, songs and sermons have incessantly 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 imperial pomp 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 imperial as to make the carpenter humble; if we wish to make plain to plain people that before this shrine kings are no better than shepherds, it is as necessary that the kings should have crowns as that the shepherds should have crooks. And if modern intellectuals do not know it, it is because nobody has really been mad enough even to try to make modern intellectualism popular. Now this conception of pomp as a popular thing, this conception of a concession to common human nature in colour and symbol, has a considerable bearing on many misunderstandings about the original enthusiasm that spread from the cave of Bethlehem over the whole Roman Empire. It is a curious fact that the moderns have mostly rebuked historic Christianity, not for being narrow, but for being broad. They have rebuked it because it did prove itself the desire of all nations, because it did satisfy the cravings of many creeds, because it did prove itself to idolaters as something as magic as their idols, or did prove itself to patriots something as lovable as their native land. In many other matters indeed, besides this popular art, we may find examples of the same illogical prejudice. Nothing betrays more curiously the bias of historians against the Christian faith than the fact that they blame in Christians the 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 later as proofs of Christian corruption. It was noble of pagans to be 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 it satisfied the Greek intellect and wielded the Roman power.
Now on the first example of the attempt of theology to meet the claims of philosophy I will not here dwell at length. I will only remark in passing that it is an utter fallacy to suggest, as for instance Mr. Wells suggests in his fascinating Outline of History, that the subtleties of theology were a 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 humanitarians of a broad religion more commonly offer as a model of simplicity than that most mystical affirmation “God is Love.” And there is no theological quarrel of the Councils of the Church which they, especially Mr. Wells, more commonly deride as bitter and barren than that at the Council of Nicea about the Co-eternity of the Divine Son. Yet the subtle statement is simply a metaphysical explanation of the simple statement; and it would be quite possible even to make it a popular explanation, by saying that God could not love when there was nothing to be loved. Now the Church Councils were 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 considered more calmly by experts. But it may reasonably be suggested, I think, that the concentration of the Greek intellect on these things did gradually pass from a popular to a more professional or official thing; and that the traces of it have finally tended to fade from the official religion of the East. It was far otherwise with the more poetical and therefore more practical religion of the West. It was far otherwise with that direct appeal to pathos and affection in the highly coloured picture of the Shepherd and the King. In the West the world not only prolonged its life but recovered its youth. That is the meaning of the movement I have described as 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 exactly that strange and simple energy that belongs to the story of Bethlehem. Not in vain had Constantine come clad in purple to look down into that dark cave at his feet; nor did the star mislead him when it seemed to 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 world of death, and their journey ended in the land of the living. They came out into a world more wonderful than the eyes of men have looked on before or after; they heard the hammers of hundreds of happy craftsmen working for once according to their own will, and saw St. Francis walking with his halo a cloud of birds.
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CHAPTER XI
THE MEANING OF THE CRUSADE
There are three examples of Western work on the great eastern slope of the Mount of Olives; and they form a sort of triangle illustrating the truth about the different influences of the West on the East. At the foot of the hill is the garden kept by the Franciscans on the alleged site of Gethsemane, and containing the hoary olive that is supposed to be the terrible tree of the agony of Christ. Given the great age and slow growth of the olives, the tradition is not so unreasonable as some may suppose. But whether or not it is historically right, it is not artistically wrong. The instinct, if it was only an instinct, that made men fix upon this strange growth of grey and twisted wood, was a true imaginative instinct. One of the strange qualities of this strange Southern tree is its almost startling hardness; accidentally to strike the branch of an olive is like striking rock. With its stony surface, stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is often more like a grotto than a tree. Hence it does not seem so unnatural that it should be treated as a holy grotto; or that this strange vegetation should claim to stand for ever like a sculptured monument. Even the shimmering or shivering silver foliage of the living olive might well have a legend like that of the aspen; as if it had grown grey with fear from the apocalyptic paradox of a divine vision 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 statement of all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew; credo quia impossibile.
Around this terrible spot the Franciscans have done something which will strike 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 way that 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 sunshine with the awful shadow in the centre is certainly an incongruity in 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 would be something like this; suppose we imagine a company of children, such as those whom Christ blessed in Jerusalem, afterwards put permanently 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 red daisies or yellow marigolds. I really do not know that there is anything better that grown up people could do, since anything that 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 dared to be cheerful. It may be too awful an adventure of the imagination to imagine Christ in that garden. But there is not the smallest difficulty about imagining St. Francis there; and that is something to say of an institution which is eight hundred years old.
Immediately above this little garden, overshadowing and almost overhanging it, is a gorgeous gilded building with golden domes and minarets glittering in the sun, and filling a splendid situation with almost shameless splendour; the Russian church built over the upper part of the garden, belonging to the Orthodox-Greeks. Here again many Western travellers will be troubled; and will think that 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 sight of 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 art as Aladdin has a place in literature; especially since it is oriental literature. Those wise missionaries in China who were not afraid to depict the Twelve Apostles in the costume of Chinamen might 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 child and 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 sort of 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 the German 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 modernity compared with the things around, with the quaint garden of the Franciscans or the fantastic temple of the Russians. It is what I can only describe as a handsome building; rather as the 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 dizzy tower to the bottom of its deepest foundations there is not one line or 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 pretentious in a good and innocent way. What annoys me about it is that it was 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 except how to build it. We feel that they accumulated on that spot all the learning and organisation and information and wealth of the world, to do this one particular thing; and then did it wrong. They did it wrong, not through superstition, not through fanatical exaggeration, not through provincial ignorance, but through pure, profound, internal, intellectual incompetence; that intellectual incompetence which so often goes with intellectual pride. I will mention only one matter out of a hundred. All the columns in 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 slender but the capital is not only big but bulging; and it has the air of bulging downwards, as if pressing heavily on something too slender to support it. This is false, not to any of the particular schools 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 of a tree, like the jet of a fountain or even like the rush of a rocket. But a slender thing beneath, obviously oppressed by a bloated thing above, suggests weakness by one of those miraculous mistakes that are as precisely wrong as masterpieces are precisely right. And to all this is added the intolerable intuition; that the Russians and the Franciscans, even if we credit them with fantastic ignorance, are at least looking up at the sky; and we know how the learned Germans would look down upon them, from their monstrous tower upon the hill.
And this is as true of the moral as of the artistic elements in the modern Jerusalem. To show that I am not unjustly partisan, I will say frankly that I see little to complain of in that common subject of complaint; the mosaic portrait of the Emperor on the ceiling of the chapel. It is but one among many figures; and it is not an unknown practice to include a figure of the founder in such church decorations. The real example of that startling moral stupidity which marked the 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 of the actual fact; and merely records in outline and relief the temporary masquerade 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 lunatic a proceeding than if he had filled the whole ceiling with cherub heads with his own features, or festooned all the walls with one ornamental 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 victory and supremacy of the Turks. In other words, he came to Jerusalem 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 those circumstances 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 with the 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 all the cant of newspaper nationality, between the English and the Germans (who were classed together by the same newspapers a little time before 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 shield of a Red Cross Knight.
It is obvious enough that Palmerston would have said that he cared no more for the Crusade than for the Siege of Troy; that his diplomacy was directed by practical patriotic considerations of the moment; and that he regarded the religious wars of the twelfth century as a rubbish heap of remote superstitions. In this he would be quite wrong, but quite intelligible and quite sincere; an English aristocrat of the nineteenth century inheriting from the English aristocrats of the eighteenth century; whose views were simply those of Voltaire. And these things are something of an allegory. For the Voltairian version of the Crusades is still by far the most reasonable of all merely hostile views of the Crusades. If they were not a creative movement of religion, then they were simply a destructive movement of superstition; and whether we agree with Voltaire in calling it superstition or with Villehardouin in calling it religion, at least both these very clear-headed Frenchmen would agree that the motive did exist and did explain the facts. But just as there is a clumsy German building with statues that at once patronise and parody the Crusaders, so there is a clumsy German theory that at once patronises and minimises the Crusades. According to this theory 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. Louis were not, as Villehardouin would say, fighting for the truth; they were not even, as Voltaire would say, fighting for what they thought 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 new and unexpected nomadism. They were not inspired either by faith or fanaticism, but by an unusually aimless taste for foreign travel. This theory that the war of the two great religions could be explained by “Wanderlust” was current about twenty years ago among the 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 been patient 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 recover the old Teutonic theory of the Folk-Wandering of Peter the Hermit was 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 most loyal 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 Hospice on the hill it was put together with great care and knowledge and it is rotten from top to bottom. I do not understand, for that matter, why that alliance which we enjoy with Mr. Pound should 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 merely through the same vague nomadic need as the Christian Army in Palestine. Surely Pershing as well as Peter the Hermit was merely a rather restless gentleman who found his health improved by frequent change of scene. The Americans said, and perhaps thought, that they were fighting for democracy; and the Crusaders said, and perhaps thought, that they were fighting for Christianity. But as we know what the Crusaders meant better than they did themselves, I cannot quite understand why we do not enjoy the same valuable omniscience about 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 him and 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 article in an envelope and put it in a pillar-box. It is vain to correct by cold logic the power of such primitive appetites; nature herself was behind the seemingly random thoughtlessness of the deed. And now that it is irrevocably done, he can look back on it and trace the large lines of an awful law of averages; wherein it is ruled by a ruthless necessity that a certain number of such Americans should write a certain number of such articles, as the leaves fall or the flowers return.
In plain words, this sort of theory is a blasphemy against the intellectual dignity of man. It is a blunder as well as a blasphemy; for it goes miles out of its way to find a bestial explanation when there is obviously a human explanation. It is as if a man told me that a dim survival of the instincts of a quadruped 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 grave disadvantages in sitting on a chair with one leg. Or it is as if I were told that I liked to swim in the sea, solely because some early forms 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 because the divine gift of reason tells me that it would be unsatisfactory to swim on the land. In short this sort of vague evolutionary theorising simply amounts to finding an unconvincing explanation of something that needs no explanation. And the case is really quite as simple with great political and religious movements by which man has from time to time changed the world in this or that respect in which he happened to think it would be the better for a change. The Crusade was a religious movement, but it was also a perfectly rational movement; one might almost say a rationalist movement. I could quite understand Mr. Pound saying that such a campaign for a creed was immoral; and indeed it often has been, and now perhaps generally is, quite horribly immoral. But when he implies that it is 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 fact that 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 modern conscript or professional soldier. He is more rational in his object, which is the intelligent and intelligible object of conversion; where the modern militarist has an object much more 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 even the 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 for this purpose, but the purpose itself is looser and more irrational. The object of all war is peace; but the object of religious war is mental as well as material peace; it is agreement. In short religious war aims ultimately at equality, where national war aims relatively at superiority. Conversion is the one sort of conquest in which the conquered must rejoice.
In that sense alone it is foolish for us in the West to sneer at those who kill men when a foot is set in a holy place, when we ourselves kill hundreds of thousands when a foot is put across a frontier. It is absurd for us to despise those who shed blood 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 only in its conception of ending the difference, but in its mere act of recognising the difference, as the deepest kind of difference. It is to reverse all reason to suggest that a man’s politics matter and his religion does not matter. It is to say he is affected by 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 walking under new lamp-posts, but not altered when he is another creature walking under strange stars. It is exactly as if we were to say that two people ought 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 included York it did not matter whether it was New York; or that so long as a man is in Essex we do not care whether he is in England.
Christendom would have been entirely justified in the abstract in being alarmed or suspicious at the mere rise of a great power that was not Christian. Nobody nowadays would think it odd to express regret at the rise of a power because it was Militarist or Socialist or even Protectionist. But it is far more natural to be conscious of a difference, not about the order of battle but the 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 foreigners but about the spiritual divisions even between us and friends. These are the things that differ profoundly with differing views of the ultimate nature of the universe. For the things of our country are 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 dared to christen as the love that makes the world go round. For this is the great paradox of life; that there are not only wheels within wheels, but the larger wheels within the smaller. When a whole community rests on one conception of life and death and the origin of things, it is quite entitled to watch the rise of another community founded on another conception as the rise of 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 not been attacked. But as a matter of history it had been attacked. The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter of history he was already an old enemy. The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of 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 I have argued above, that a religious division must make a difference; it had already made a difference. The difference stared them in the face in the startling transformation of Roman Barbary and of Roman Spain. In short it was something which must happen in theory and which did happen in practice; all expectation suggested 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 division involved every principle of the science of thought; and the last developments followed out every principle of the science of war. The Crusade was the counter-attack. It was the defensive army taking the 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 wandering of an animal. But a man so intelligent would not have made a mistake so extraordinary but for another error which it is here very essential to consider. To suggest that men engaged, rightly or wrongly, in so logical a military and political operation were only migrating like birds or swarming like bees is as ridiculous as to say that the Prohibition campaign in America was only an animal reversion towards lapping as the dog lappeth, or Rowland Hill’s introduction of postage stamps an animal taste for licking as the cat licks. Why should we provide other people with a remote reason for their own 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 to the pompous and clumsy building of the scientific Germans on the Mount of Olives, because it substitutes in the same way a modern stupidity for the medieval simplicity. But just as the German Hospice after all 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 possibly have meant, as distinct from all that they have actually said. There is indeed one respect in which the case of the Crusade does differ very much from modern political cases like prohibition or the penny post. I do not refer to such incidental peculiarities as the fact that Prohibition could only have succeeded through the enormous power of modern plutocracy, or that even the convenience of the postage goes along with an extreme coercion by the police. It is a somewhat deeper difference that I mean; and it may possibly be what 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 much more intellectual and dignified; a riot. In order to understand this religious war we must class it, not so much with the wars of history as with the revolutions of history. As I shall try to show briefly on a later page, it not only had all the peculiar good and the peculiar evil 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 it was popular as tantamount to a confession that it was animal. In these days when papers and speeches are full of words like democracy and self-determination, anything really resembling the movement of a mass of angry men is regarded as no better than a stampede of bulls or a scurry of rats. The new sociologists call it the herd instinct, just as the old reactionaries called it the many-headed beast. But both agree in implying that it is hardly worth while to count how many head there are of such cattle. In face of such fashionable comparisons it will seem comparatively mild to talk of migration as it occurs among birds or insects. Nevertheless we may venture to state with some confidence that both the sociologists and the reactionaries are wrong. It does not follow that human beings become less than human because their ideas appeal to more and more of humanity. Nor can we deduce that men are 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 herd of bulls or a pack of wolves, any more than the crimes of a mob can be committed by a flock of sheep or a shoal of herrings. Birds have never been known to besiege and capture an empty cage of an aviary, on a point of principle, merely because it had kept a few other birds in captivity, as the mob besieged and captured the almost empty Bastille, merely because it was the fortress of a historic tyranny. And rats have never been known to die by thousands merely in order to visit a particular trap in which a particular rat had perished, as the poor peasants of the First Crusade died in thousands for a far-off sight of the Sepulchre or a fragment of the true cross. In this sense indeed the Crusade was not rationalistic, if the rat is the only rationalist. But it will seem more truly rational to point out that the inspiration of such a crowd is not in such instincts as we share with the animals, but precisely in such ideas as the animals never (with all their virtues) understand.
What is peculiar about the First Crusade is that it was in quite a new and abnormal sense a popular movement. I might almost say it was the only popular movement there ever was in the world. For it was not a thing which the populace followed; it was actually a thing which the populace led. It was not only essentially a revolution, but it was the only revolution I know of in which the masses began by acting alone, and practically without any support from any of the classes. When they had acted, the classes came 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 certain ideas were first suggested by a few philosophers, and then preached by demagogues to the democracy. This was to a great extent true of the French Revolution; it was probably yet more true of the Russian Revolution; and we need not here pause upon the fine shade of 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 or private prayers, as if he had come out to fight with his own domestic poker or private carving-knife. He was not armed with new weapons of 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 Aquinas but Peter the Hermit, who can hardly be called even a popular leader, but rather a popular flag. And it was his army, or rather his enormous rabble, that first marched across the world to die for the deliverance of Jerusalem.
Historians say that in that huge host of thousands there were only nine knights. To any one who knows even a little of medieval war the fact seems astounding. It is indeed a long exploded fallacy 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 Ages was almost entirely feudal; indeed we might rather say that feudalism was the name of their military organisation. That so vast a military mass should have attempted to move at all, with only nine of the natural military 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 Moslems and was massacred; or, might I so mystically express it, martyred. Many of the great kings and knights who followed in their tracks did not so clearly deserve any haloes for the simplicity and purity of their motives. The canonisation of such a crowd might be impossible, and would certainly be resisted in modern opinion; chiefly because they indulged their democratic violence on the way by killing various usurers; a course which naturally fills modern society with an anger verging on alarm. A perversity leads me to weep rather more over the many slaughtered 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 had a common creed, was aroused, and a new army followed of a very different type of skill and training; led by most of the ablest captains and by some of the most chivalrous gentlemen of the age. For curiously enough, the host contained more than one cultured gentleman who was as simple a Christian as any peasant, and as recklessly ready to be butchered or tortured for the mere name of Christ.
It is a tag of the materialists that the truth about history rubs away the romance of history. It is dear to the modern mind because 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 modern man 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 much more like a knight of the Round Table. In fact he was a far better man than most of the knights of the Round Table, in whose characters the fabulist, knowing that he was writing a fable, was tactful enough to introduce a larger admixture of vice. Truth is not 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 those admirable accidents which are generally and perhaps rightly regarded as 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 magnanimity of knighthood. Everything about him suggests it; from his first conversion from the imperial to the papal (and popular) cause, to his great refusal of the kinghood of the city he had taken; “I will not 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 plainest public spirit. But even if we dismiss all that was written of him by Christian chroniclers because they might be his friends (which would be a pathetic and exaggerated compliment to the harmonious unity of Crusaders and of Christians) he would still remain sufficiently 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 Toulouse with the southern French and Robert of Normandy, the adventurous son of the Conqueror, with the Normans and the English. But it would be an error, I think, and one tending to make the whole subsequent story a thing not so much misunderstood as unintelligible, to suppose that the whole crusading movement had been suddenly and unnaturally stiffened with the highest chivalric discipline. Unless I am much mistaken, a great mass of that army was 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 and wail together, the importance of the demagogue, Peter the Hermit, in spite of his unmilitary character, and the wide differences between the designs of the leaders and the actions of the rank and file. It was a crowd of rude and simple men that cast themselves on the sacred dust at the first sight of the little mountain town 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 sea of Islam. Meanwhile Godfrey came up the road from Jaffa, and crossing the mountain ridge, saw also with his living eyes his vision of the world’s desire. But the poorest men about him probably 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 from the Northern villages, who had never dreamed in nightmares of such landscapes or such a sun, who knew not how men lived at all in such a 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 rotted along their road; they arrived shrivelled to rags or already raving with fever and they did what they had come to do.
Above all, it is clear that they had the vices as well as the virtues of a mob. The shocking massacre in which they indulged in the sudden relaxation of success is quite obviously a massacre by a mob. It is all the more profoundly revolutionary because it must have been for the most part a French mob. It was of the same order as the Massacre of September, and it is but a part of the same truth that 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, directed against what was also regarded as an anti-national aristocracy. It is practically self-evident that the Christian commanders were opposed to it, and tried to stop it. Tancred promised their lives to 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 loose and raging in the streets of the Holy City. And in nothing do we see that spirit of revolution more clearly than in the sight of all those peasants and serfs and vassals, in that one wild moment 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 even horrible excitement. Those who tell us to-day about the psychology of the crowd will agree that men who have so suffered and so succeeded are not normal; that their brains are in a dreadful balance which may turn either way. They entered the city at last in a mood in which they might all have become monks; and instead they all became murderers. A brilliant general, who played a decisive part in our own recent Palestinian campaign, told me with a sort of grim humour that he hardly wondered at the story; for he himself had entered Jerusalem in a sort of 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 that hangs over our human nature, making it enter the Holy City as if it were the Heavenly City, and more than any earthly city can be. But the struggle which led to the scaling of Jerusalem in the First Crusade was something much wilder and more incalculable than anything that can be conceived in modern war. We can hardly wonder that the crusading crowd saw the town in front of them as a sort of tower full of demons, and the hills around them as an enchanted and 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 what could be done on their own side; every movement against them was a stab out of the darkness and every movement they made was a leap in the dark. First, on the one side, we have Tancred trying to take the whole fortified city by climbing up a single slender ladder, as if a man tried to lasso the peak of a mountain. Then we have the flinging from the turrets of a strange and 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 have seemed the flaming oil of witchcraft. Then Godfrey and the wiser of the warriors set about to build wooden siege-towers and found they had next to no wood to build them. There was scarcely anything in that rocky waste but the dwarf trees of olive; a poetic fantasy woven about that war in after ages described them as hindered even in their wood-cutting by the demons of that weird place. And indeed the fancy had an essential truth, for the very nature of 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 touch with 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 dragged them heavily against the high towers of the city. The catapults of the city answered them, the cataracts of devouring fire came down; the wooden towers swayed and tottered, and two of them suddenly stuck motionless and useless. And as the darkness fell a great flare must 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 raised it again on the high ground to the north of the city which is now marked by the pine tree that grows outside Herod’s gate. And all the time he toiled, it was said, sinister sorcerers sat upon the battlements, working unknown marvels for the undoing of the labour of man. If the great knight had a touch of such symbolism on his own side, he might have seen in his own strife with the solid timber something of the craft that had surrounded the birth of his creed, and the sacred trade of the carpenter. And indeed the very pattern of all carpentry is cruciform, and there is something more than an accident in the allegory. The transverse position of the timber does indeed involve many of those mathematical that are analogous to moral truths and almost every structural shape has the shadow of the mystic rood, as the three dimensions have a shadow of the Trinity. Here is the true mystery of equality; since the longer beam might lengthen itself to infinity, and never be nearer to the symbolic shape without the help of the shorter. Here is that war and wedding between two contrary forces, resisting and supporting 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 circle of Asia. It may be improbable, though it is far from impossible (for the age was philosophical enough) that a man like Godfrey thus extended the mystical to the metaphysical; but the writer of a real romance about him would be well within his rights in making him see the symbolism of his own tower, a tower rising above him through the clouds of night as if taking hold on the heaven or 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 sign of the cross.
When dawn was come all those starving peasants may well have stood before the high impregnable walls in the broad daylight of despair. Even their nightmares during the night, of unearthly necromancers looking down at them from the battlements and with signs and spells paralysing all their potential toils, may well have been a sort of pessimistic consolation, anticipating and accounting for failure. The Holy City had become for them a fortress full of fiends, when Godfrey de Bouillon again set himself sword in hand upon the wooden tower and gave the order once more to drag it tottering towards the towers on either side of the postern gate. So they crawled again across the fosse full 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 in the mire, and from the engines of the Greek Fire all the torrents of their torment came down on them like red rivers of hell. For indeed the souls of those peasants must have been sickened with something of the topsy-turvydom felt by too many peasants of our own 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 may have mingled with the dust of battle, and darkened such light as showed where shattering rocks were rending a roof of shields, to men bowed and blinded as they are by such labour of dragging and such a hailstorm of death. They may have heard through all the racket of nameless noises the high minaret cries of 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 cloud of battle, the tower of timber and the tower of stone had touched and met in mid-heaven; and great Godfrey, alone and alive, had leapt upon the wall of Jerusalem.
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CHAPTER XII
THE FALL OF CHIVALRY
On the back of this book is the name of the New Jerusalem and on the first page of it a phrase about the necessity of going back to the old even to find the new, as a man retraces his steps to a sign-post. The common sense of that process is indeed most mysteriously misunderstood. Any suggestion that progress has at any time taken the wrong turning is always answered by the argument that 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-trap by turning to the left by the red pillar-box, instead of to the right by the blue palings of the inn called the Rising Sun, my progressive guide always proceeds to soothe me by talking about the myth of an Age of Gold. He says I am idealising the right turning. He says the blue palings are not so blue as 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 blue was of solid sapphires, or the sun of solid gold. In short he assures me I am wrong in supposing that the right turning was right in every possible respect; as if I had ever supposed anything of the sort. I want to go back to that particular place, not because it was all my fancy paints it, or because it was the best place my fancy can paint; but because it was a many thousand times better place than 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 was the 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 to the wrong one.
Now it is quite true that there is less general human testimony to the notion of a New Jerusalem in the future than to the notion of a Golden Age in the past. But neither of those ideas, whether or no they are illusions, are any answer to the question of a plain man in the plain position of this parable; a man who has to find some guidance in the past if he is to get any good in the future. What he positively knows, in any case, is the complete collapse of the present. Now that is the exact truth about the thing so often rebuked as a romantic and unreal return of modern men to medieval things. They suppose they have taken the wrong turning, because they know they are in the wrong place. To know that, it is necessary not to idealise the medieval world, but merely to realise the modern world. It is not so much that they suppose the medieval world was above the 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 live in a New Jerusalem of pearl and sapphire in the future, or that a man was meant to live in a picturesque and richly-painted tavern of the past; but with a strong inward and personal persuasion that a man was not meant to live in a man-trap.
For there is and will be more and more a turn of total change in all our talk and writing about history. Everything in the past was praised if it had led up to the present, and blamed if it would have led up to anything else. In short everybody has been searching the past for the secret of our success. Very soon everybody may be searching the past for the secret of our failure. They may be talking in such terms as they use after a motor smash or a bankruptcy; where was the blunder? They may be writing such books as 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 something of the dignity of Babel or Babylon. Whether we call it the nemesis of Capitalism or the nightmare of Bolshevism makes no difference; the rich grumble as much as the poor; every one is discontented, and none more than those who are chiefly discontented with the discontent. About that discord we are in perfect harmony; about that disease we all think alike, whatever we think of the diagnosis or the cure. By whatever process in the past we might have come to the right place, practical facts in the present and future will prove 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 world to 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 road will 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 age was 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 which everything went wrong. It was the moment when things might have developed well, and did develop badly. Or rather, to be yet more exact, it was the moment when they were developing well, and yet they were driven to develop badly. This was the history of all the medieval states and of none more than medieval Jerusalem; indeed there were signs of some serious idea of making it the model medieval 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 more important part played by Jerusalem, I think, in all that great progress 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 that might have led to it. It is bound up with that quality of the civilisation 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 energetic and incomplete when it died, or very shortly before it died. This is not a matter of sympathy or antipathy, but of appreciation of an interesting historic comparison with other historic cases. When the Roman Empire finally failed we cannot of course say that 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 done certain 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 was Christian but most of the provinces still heathen. Then we should have 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 is very much the truth in the matter of the medieval civilisation. It was not merely that the medievals left undone what they might have done, but they left undone what they were doing. This potential promise 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-work were developed, not only less than they should have been, but less than they would have been. There is no sort of reason why their sculpture should not have become as perfect as their architecture; there is no sort of reason why their sense of form should not have been as finished as their sense of colour. A statue like the St. George of Donatello would have stood more 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 status of the craftsman. The best proof that the system of the guilds had an undeveloped good in it is that the most advanced modern men are 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 our very pioneers are now digging in the ruins to find the riches. That the new guildsmen add a great deal that never belonged to the old guildsmen is not only a truth, but is part of the truth I maintain here. The new guildsmen add what the old guildsmen 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 yet visible in the new; such as individual humour in the handiwork. The point here, however, is not merely that the worker worked well but that he was working better; not merely that his mind was free but that it was growing freer. All this popular power and humour was increasing 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 does not show an individual interest in his work. But it will be well to realise that they would be much more annoyed with him if he did. The medieval workman took so individual an interest in his work that 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 them as ugly as devils; carving anti-clerical caricatures on the very seats and stalls of the clerics. If a modern householder, on entering his own bathroom, found that the plumber had twisted the taps into the images of 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 likeness of himself, his surprise might even be tinged with disapproval. It may be just as well that builders and bricklayers do not gratuitously attach gargoyles to our smaller residential villas. But well or ill, it is certainly true that this feature of a flexible popular fancy has never reappeared in any school of architecture or any state of society since the medieval decline. The great classical buildings of the Renascence were swept as bare of it as any villa in Balham. But those who best appreciate this loss to popular art will be the first to agree that at its best it retained a touch of the barbaric as well as the popular. While we can admire these matters of the grotesque, we can admit that their work was sometimes unintentionally as well as intentionally grotesque. Some of the carving did remain so rude that the angels were almost as ugly as the devils. But this is the very point upon which I would here insist; the mystery of why men who were so obviously only 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 most modern 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 progress in all history. Men have seldom moved with such rapidity and such unity from barbarism to civilisation as they did from the end of the Dark Ages to the times of the universities and the parliaments, the cathedrals and the guilds. Up to a certain point we may say that everything, at whatever stage of improvement, was full of the promise of improvement. Then something began to go wrong, almost equally rapidly, and the glory of this great culture is not so much in what it did as in what it might have done. It recalls one of these typical medieval speculations, full of the very fantasy of free will, in which the schoolmen tried to fancy the fate of every herb or animal if Adam had not eaten the apple. It remains, in a cant historical phrase, one of the great might-have-beens of history.
I have said that it died young; but perhaps it would be truer to say that it suddenly grew old. Like Godfrey and many of its great champions in Jerusalem, 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 explain that secret and rapid decay of medieval civilisation from within. Only a few generations separated the world that worshipped St. Francis from the world that burned Joan of Arc. One would think there might be no more than a date and a number between the white mystery of Louis the Ninth and the black mystery of Louis the Eleventh. This is the very real historical mystery; the more realistic is our study of medieval things, the more puzzled we shall be about the peculiar creeping 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 guildsmen and 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 Reformation was a just revolt and revenge or an unjust culmination and conquest. It is common ground to Catholics and Protestants of intelligence that evils preceded and produced the schism; and that evils were produced by it and have pursued it down to our own day. We know it if only in the one example, that the schism begat the Thirty Years’ War, and the Thirty Years’ War begat the Seven 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 erect an ethical system external to the whole culture of Christendom. But it can still be reasonably asked what begat the schism; and it can still 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 a fixed fancy that I knew what it was. It is a thing that cannot be 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 heart went out of it with the loss of Jerusalem. Let it be observed that I do not say the loss of the war, or even the Crusade. For the war against Islam was not lost. The Moslem was overthrown in 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 was a vision; something with which all stories stop, something where the rainbow ends, something over the hills and far away. In Spain they had been victorious; but their castle was not even a castle in Spain. It was a castle east of the sun and west of 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 they said in the very centre of the earth. It is east of the sun of 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 mirror for poets and a most fatal magnet for lunatics.
Anyhow the fall of Jerusalem, and in that sense the failure of the Crusades, had a widespread effect, as I should myself suggest, for the reason I have myself suggested. Because it had been a popular movement, it was a popular disappointment; and because it had been a popular movement, its ideal was an image; a particular picture in 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 stage properties required for some village play, one of those popular plays acted by the medieval trades unions, for which the guild of the shipwrights would build Noah’s Ark or the guild of the barbers provide golden wigs for the haloes of the Twelve Apostles. The list of those crude pieces of stage furniture had a curious colour of poetry about it, like the impromptu apparatus of a nursery charade; a cloud, an idol with a club, and notably among the rest, the walls and towers of Jerusalem. I can imagine them patiently painted and gilded as 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 towers of wood and pasteboard with a sort of pain, and perhaps put them away in a corner, as a child will tire of a toy especially if it is associated with a disappointment or a dismal misunderstanding. There is noticeable in some of the later popular poems a disposition to sulk about the Crusades. But though the popular feeling had been largely poetical, the same thing did in its degree 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 due to 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 own vision of invincibility. That was the conviction of those of us who would not accept what we considered a premature peace with Prussia. That is why we would not listen either to the Tory Pro-Germanism of Lord Lansdowne or the Socialist Pro-Germanism of Mr. Macdonald. If a lunatic believes in his luck so fixedly as to feel sure be cannot be caught, he will not only believe in it still, but believe in 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 almost a divine intervention, not only to the pursued but to the pursuers. The evil thing will chiefly appear unconquerable to those who try to conquer it. It will seem after all to have a secret of success; and those who failed against it will hide in their hearts a 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 guilds and schools and orders of knighthood and brotherhoods of friars were strangely changed and chilled. So, if the peace had left Prussianism secure even in Prussia, I believe that all the liberal ideals 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 headlines than blazon heraldic coats. For these medieval things look dead and dusty because of a defeat, which was none the less a defeat because 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 different moral level from the good Duke Godfrey; their characters were by comparison mixed and even mysterious. Perhaps the two determining personalities were Raymond of Tripoli, a skilful soldier whom his enemies seemed to have accused of being much too skilful a diplomatist; and Renaud of Chatillon, a violent adventurer whom his enemies seem to have accused of being little better than a bandit. And it is the irony of the incident that Raymond got into trouble for making a dubious peace with the Saracens, while Renaud got into trouble by making an equally dubious war on the Saracens. Renaud exacted from Moslem travellers on a certain road what he regarded as a sort of feudal toll or tax, and they regarded as a brigand ransom; and when they did not pay he attacked them. This was regarded as a breach of the truce; but probably it would have 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 gave up to the very instant of catastrophe was entirely loyal and sound, and worthy of so wise a veteran. And very likely Renaud was not merely a robber, especially in his own eyes; and there seems to be a much better case for him than many modern writers allow. But the very fact of such charges being bandied among the factions shows a certain fall from the first days under the headship of the house of Bouillon. No slanderer ever suggested that Godfrey was a traitor; no enemy ever asserted that Godfrey was only a thief. It is fairly clear that there had been a degeneration; but most people hardly realise sufficiently that there had been a very great thing from which to degenerate.
The first Crusades had really had some notion of Jerusalem as a New Jerusalem. I mean they had really had a vision of the place being not 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 of the social experiments in the rest of Christendom. Having to begin at the beginning, they really began with what they considered the best ideas of their time; like any group of Socialists founding an ideal Commonwealth in a modern colony. A specialist on this period, Colonel Conder of the Palestine Exploration, has written that the core of the Code was founded on the recommendations of Godfrey himself in his “Letters of the Sepulchre”; and he observes concerning it: “The basis of these laws was found in Justinian’s code, and they presented features as yet quite unknown in Europe, especially in their careful 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 same applied to those who were technically serfs and actually aborigines.” The original arrangements of the Native Court seem to me singularly liberal, even by modern standards of the treatment of natives. That in many such medieval codes citizens were still called serfs is no more final than the fact that in many modern capitalist newspapers serfs are still called citizens. The whole point about the villein was that he was a tenant at least as permanent as a peasant. He “went with the land”; and there are a good many hopeless tramps starving in streets, or sleeping in ditches, who might not be sorry if they could go with a little land. It would not be very much worse than homelessness and hunger to go with a good kitchen garden of which you could always eat most of the beans and turnips; or to go with a good cornfield of which you could take a considerable proportion of the corn. There has been many a modern man would have been none 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 already evolving rapidly into a pure peasant proprietorship; and it will be long before industrialism evolves by itself into anything so equal or so free. Above all, there appears notably that universal mark of the medieval movement; the voluntary liberation of slaves. But we may willingly allow that something of the earlier success of all this was due to the personal qualities of the first knights fresh from the West; and especially to the personal justice and 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 Armenian princes 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 seems to have been regarded as a somewhat unsatisfactory character. He had quarrelled with Raymond, who was ruler of Galilee, and a curious 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 furious Templar, Gerard of Bideford, of which mention has been made already. But the most serious threat to them and their New Jerusalem was 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 ambition and ardour of Saladin.
With the breach of the truce, or even the tale of it, the common danger of Christians was apparent; and Raymond of Tripoli repaired to 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 waterless wastes between them and the enemy. Into those wastes they advanced, and they were already weary and unfit for warfare by the time they came in sight of the strange hills that will be remembered for 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 had fallen gathered in a final defiance and despair round the relic they carried in their midst, a fragment of the True Cross. In that hour fell, as I have fancied, more hopes than they themselves could number, and the glory departed from the Middle Ages. There fell with them all that New Jerusalem which was the symbol of a new world, all those great and growing promises and possibilities of Christendom of which this vision was the centre, all that “justice for 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 wedded to charity and to chivalry. There was the first slip and the great swerving of our fate; and in that wilderness we lost all the things we should have loved, and shall need so long a labour to find again.
Raymond of Tripoli had hewn his way through the enemy and ridden away 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 strains in the creed or the culture that triumphed on that day; the stately Eastern courtesy and hospitality; the wild Eastern hatred and self-will. Saladin welcomed the king and gracefully gave 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 Renaud de Chatillon, and killed the prisoner with his own hands. Outside, two hundred Hospitallers and Templars were beheaded on the field of battle; by one account I have read because Saladin disliked them, and by another because they were Christian priests.
There is a strong bias against the Christians and in favour of the 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 history from dipping into historical novels. In those romances the Jew is always the oppressed where in reality he was often the oppressor. In those romances the Arab is always credited with oriental dignity and courtesy and never with oriental crookedness and cruelty. The same injustice is introduced into history, which by means of selection and omission can be made as fictitious as any fiction. Twenty historians mention the way in which the maddened Christian mob murdered the Moslems after the capture of Jerusalem, for one who mentions that the Moslem commander commanded in cold blood the murder of some two hundred of his most famous and valiant enemies after the victory of Hattin. The former cannot be shown to have been the act of 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 they are not judged by an equal balance. It may seem a paradox that there should 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 many Europeans against their own old religious organisation, which naturally made them hunt through all ages for its crimes and its victims. It was natural that Voltaire should sympathise more with a Brahmin he had never seen than with a Jesuit with whom he was engaged in a violent controversy; and should similarly feel more dislike of a Catholic who was his enemy than of a Moslem who was the enemy of his enemy. In this atmosphere of natural and even pardonable prejudice arose the habit of contrasting the intolerance of the Crusaders with the toleration shown by the Moslems. Now as there are two sides to everything, it would undoubtedly be quite possible to tell the tale of the Crusades, correctly enough in detail, and in such a way as entirely to justify the Moslems and condemn the Crusaders. But any such real record of the Moslem case would have very little 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 religious liberty and equality, as the moderns have not thought out any logical theory of toleration at all (for their vague generalisations can always be upset by twenty tests from Thugs to Christian Science) it would obviously be unreasonable to expect the moderns to understand the much clearer philosophy of the Moslems. But some rough suggestion of what was really involved may be found convenient 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 towards the idolatries of Asia. But Mahomet believed that these idols could 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 not only to be peculiar to Christianity but to be peculiar to Catholicism. Many things have been rejected by Protestantism that are not rejected 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 rankles in the Jews and is said sometimes to become hideously vitriolic. While I was 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 its application than any particular or passing persecution of Christians as such. It lay in the very fact that they did think they had a simpler and saner sort of Christianity, as do many modern Christians. They thought it could be made universal merely by being made uninteresting. Now a man preaching what he thinks is a platitude is far more intolerant than a man preaching what he admits is a paradox. It was exactly because it seemed self-evident, to Moslems as to Bolshevists, that their simple creed was suited to everybody, that they wished in that particular sweeping fashion to impose it on 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 allowed of those simple and masculine but mostly rather dangerous appetites that show themselves in a chieftain or a lord. As it had the simplest sort of religion, monotheism, so it had the simplest sort of government, monarchy. There was exactly the same direct spirit in its despotism as in its deism. The Code, the Common Law, the give and take of charters and 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 who complain of our creeds as elaborate often forget that the elaborate Western 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 is something much more subtle and sincere than any mere atrocity tales against Turks. It is the same as the moral of the Christian refusal of a Pagan Pantheon in which Christ should rank with Ammon and Apollo. Twice the Christian Church refused what seemed like a handsome offer of a large latitudinarian sort; once to include Christ as a god and once to include him as a prophet; once by the admission of all idols and once by the abandonment of all idols. Twice the Church took the risk and twice the Church survived alone and succeeded alone, filling the world with her own children; and leaving her rivals in a desert, where the idols were dead and the iconoclasts were dying.
But all this history has been hidden by a prejudice more general than the particular case of Saracens and Crusaders. The modern, or rather the Victorian prejudice against Crusaders is positive and not relative; and it would still desire to condemn Tancred if it could not acquit Saladin. Indeed it is a prejudice not so much against Crusaders as against Christians. It will not give to these heroes of religious war the fair measure it gives to the heroes of ordinary patriotic and imperial war. There never was a nobler hero than Nelson, or one more national or more normal. Yet Nelson quite certainly did do what Tancred almost certainly did not do; break his own word by giving up his own brave enemies to execution. If the cause of Nelson in other times comes to be treated as the creed of Tancred has often in recent times been treated, this incident alone will be held sufficient to prove not only that Nelson was a liar and a scoundrel, but that he did not love England at all, did not love Lady Hamilton at all, that he sailed in English ships only to pocket the prize money of French ships, and would as willingly have sailed in French ships for the prize money of English ships. That is the sort of dull dust of gold that has been shaken like the drifting dust of the desert over the swords and the relics, the crosses and the clasped hands of the men who marched to Jerusalem or died at Hattin. In these medieval pilgrims every inconsistency is a hypocrisy; while in the more modern patriots even an infamy is only an inconsistency. I have rounded off the story here with the ruin at Hattin because the 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 upon the hills the note of the whole human revolution had been struck, was changed and was silent. All the other names were only the names of 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 top which makes it look oddly like an island, habitable though uninhabited, when all Moab heaves about it and beyond it as with the curves and colours of a sea. Its stability suggests in some strange fashion what may often be felt in these lands with the longest record of culture; that there may be not only a civilisation but even a chivalry older than history. Perhaps the table-land with its round top has a romantic reminiscence of a round table. Perhaps it is only a fantastic effect of evening, for it is felt most when the low skies are swimming with the colours of sunset, and in the shadows the shattered rocks about its base take on the shapes of titanic paladins fighting and falling around it. I only know that the mere shape of the hill and vista of the landscape suggested such visions and it was only afterwards that I heard the local legend, which says it is here that some of the Christian knights made their last stand after they lost Jerusalem and which names 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 Renascence expanded into the rationalism of recent centuries, nothing seemed so ridiculous as to butcher and bleed in a distant desert not only for a tomb, but an empty tomb. The last legend of them withered under the wit of Cervantes, though he himself had fought in the last Crusade at Lepanto. They were kicked about like dead donkeys by 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 disgust of Gibbon, more serene than the similar horror with which he 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 a helmet as a tin pot, of every caricaturist on a comic paper who can draw a fat man falling off a bucking horse; of every pushing professional politician who can talk about the superstitions of the Middle Ages. Great men and small have agreed to contemn them; they were renounced by 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 judged finally and forgotten, and they were right. Centuries after their fall the full experience and development of political discovery has shown beyond question that they were right. For there is a very simple test of the truth; that the very thing 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 must rescue some lordship, or overlordship, of these old Roman provinces. Whether it is wise for England alone to claim Palestine, whether it would 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 could be its equal, and especially for the great dream of a mission for 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 very gates 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 could not rule; he was successful and he did not succeed. His baffled and 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 Roman and Byzantine culture. He fell because barbarism cannot stand; because even when it succeeds it rather falls on its foes and crushes them. And after all these things, after all these ages, with a wearier philosophy, with a heavier heart, we have been forced to do again the very thing that the Crusaders were derided for doing. What Western men failed to do for the faith, other Western men have been forced to do even without the faith. The sons of Tancred are again in Tripoli. The heirs of Raymond are again in Syria. And men from the Midlands or the Northumbrian towns went again through 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 shadow on their souls; they crossed dark and disastrous fields whose fame had been hidden from them, and avenged the fathers they had forgotten. And the most cynical of modern diplomatists, making their settlement by the most sceptical of modern philosophies, can find no practical or even temporary solution for this sacred land, except to bring it again under the crown of Coeur de Lion and the cross of St. George.
There came in through the crooked entry beside the great gap in the wall a tall soldier, dismounting and walking and wearing only the dust-hued habit of modern war. There went no trumpet before him, neither did he enter by the Golden Gate; but the silence of the deserts was full of a phantom acclamation, as when from far away a wind brings in a whisper the cheering of many thousand men. For in that hour a long-lost cry found fulfilment, and something counted irrational returned in the reason of things. And at last even the wise understood, and at last even the learned were enlightened on a need truly and indeed international, which a mob in a darker age had known by the light of nature; something that could be denied and delayed and evaded, but not escaped for ever. Id Deus vult.
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CHAPTER XIII
THE PROBLEM OF ZIONISM
There is an attitude for which my friends and I were for a long period rebuked and even reviled; and of which at the present period we are less likely than ever to repent. It was always called Anti-Semitism; but it was always much more true to call it Zionism. At any rate it 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 consisted entirely in saying that Jews are Jews; and as a logical consequence that they are not Russians or Roumanians or Italians or Frenchmen or Englishmen. During the war the newspapers commonly referred to them as Russians; but the ritual wore so singularly thin that I remember one newspaper paragraph saying that the Russians in the East End complained of the food regulations, because their religion forbade them to eat pork. My own brief contact with the Greek priests of the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem did not permit me to discover any trace of this detail of their discipline; and even the Russian pilgrims were said to be equally negligent in the matter. The point for the moment, however, is that if I was violently opposed to 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 dignity and status of a separate nation. We desired that in some fashion, and so far as possible, Jews should be represented by Jews, should live in 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 more rational 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 discussed everywhere as a fact; and one of the most menacing facts of the age. I have lived to see people who accused me of Anti-Semitism become 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 them at all. But, above all, I have seen with my own eyes wild mobs marching 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 had been 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 English pedantry bring us within an inch of an enormous English peril. The first was when all the Victorian historians and philosophers had told us that our German cousin was a cousin german and 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 few short years, English politicians and journalists have discovered the dreadful revenge of reality. To pretend that something is what it is 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 always abruptly punish and pulverise us, merely by being what it is. For years we were told that the Germans were a sort of Englishman because they were Teutons; but it was all the worse for us when we found out what Teutons really were. For years we were told that Jews were 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 people a new friend whom they instantly recognise as an old enemy. It is an absurd position because it is a false position; but it is merely the penalty of falsehood.
Whether this Eastern anger is reasonable or not may be discussed in a moment; but what is utterly unreasonable is not the anger but the 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 as an 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 logic of purely English supremacy and, impartiality; and not by what seems to everybody in Palestine a monstrous muddle of the two. But of course it is not only the peril in Palestine that has made the realisation of the Jewish problem, which once suffered all the dangers of a fad, suffer the opposite dangers of a fashion. The same journalists who politely describe Jews as Russians are now very impolitely describing certain Russians who are Jews. Many who had no particular objection to Jews as Capitalists have a very great objection to them as Bolshevists. Those who had an innocent unconsciousness of the nationality of Eckstein, even when he called himself Eckstein, have managed to discover the 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 with the new Anti-Semitism which is merely Anti-Socialism. There are good, honourable and magnanimous Jews of every type and rank, there are many to 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 among different types of Jews, I have much more sympathy with the Jew who 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 respect for 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 head of 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 actions are violent, but because its very thought is materialistic and mean. And if this preference is true even of Bolshevism, it is ten times truer of Zionism. It really seems to me rather hard that the full storm of fury should have burst about the Jews, at the very moment when 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 sincerity for their own.
But in order to judge this Jewish possibility, we must understand more fully the nature of the Jewish problem. We must consider it from the start, because there are still many who do not know that there 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 describing him as a man of the East; but in truth another very real injustice may be involved in treating him as a man of the West. Very often even the joke against the Jew is rather a joke against those who have made the joke; that is, a joke against what they have 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 about the Hebrew habit of putting on a top-hat as an act of worship. It is vaguely mixed up with another line of humour, about another class of Jew, who wears a large number of hats; and who must not therefore 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 something inevitably fantastic about this formality of the synagogue. But we ought to remember that we have made the Western conditions which startle the Western eyes. It seems odd to wear a modern top-hat as if it were a mitre or a biretta; it seems quainter still when the hat is 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 helps himself to a hat as a sort of hors d’oeuvre. All this could easily be turned into a joke; but we ought to realise that the joke is against ourselves. It is not merely we who make fun of it, but we who have made it funny. For, after all, nobody can pretend that this particular type of head-dress is a part of that uncouth 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 utensils dedicated to the obscure service of the Ark; nobody can suppose that a top-hat descended from heaven among the wings and wheels of the flying visions of the Prophets. For this wild vision the West is entirely responsible. Europe has created the Tower of Giotto; but it has also created the topper. We of the West must bear the 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 Hebrew ritual seem ridiculous. Performed in the old original Hebrew fashion it is not ridiculous, but rather if anything sublime. For the original fashion was an oriental fashion; and the Jews are orientals; and the mark of all such orientals is the wearing of long and loose draperies. To throw those loose draperies over the head is decidedly a dignified and even poetic gesture. One can imagine something like justice done to its majesty and mystery in one of the great dark drawings of William Blake. It may be true, and personally I think it is true, that the Hebrew covering of the head signifies a certain stress on the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom, while the Christian uncovering of 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 that would point to the same conclusion. A number of points upon which the unfortunate alien is blamed would be much improved if 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 vulgarity in clothes, and especially the colours of clothes, with which a certain sort of Jews brighten the landscape or seascape at Margate or many holiday resorts. When we see a foreign gentleman on Brighton Pier wearing yellow spats, a magenta waistcoat, and an emerald green tie, we feel that he has somehow missed certain fine shades of social sensibility and fitness. It might considerably surprise the company on Brighton Pier, if he were to reply by solemnly unwinding his green necktie from round his neck, and winding it round his head. Yet the reply would be the right one; and would be equally logical and artistic. As soon as the green tie had become a green turban, it might look as appropriate and even attractive as the green turban of any pilgrim of Mecca or any descendant of Mahomet, who walks with a stately air through the streets of Jaffa or Jerusalem. The bright colours that make the Margate Jews hideous are no brighter than those that make the Moslem crowd picturesque. They are only worn in the wrong place, in the wrong way, and in conjunction with a type and 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 have often 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 any political or social position which he can gain in open competition; let us not listen for a moment to any suggestions of reactionary restrictions or racial privilege. Let a Jew be Lord Chief justice, if his exceptional veracity and reliability have clearly marked him out for that post. Let a Jew be Archbishop of Canterbury, if our national religion has attained to that receptive breadth that would render such a transition unobjectionable and 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 with the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons in Parliament 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 there dressed as an Arab. It is not my point at present to dwell on the pleasing if flippant fancy of how much this would transform the political scene; of the dapper figure of Sir Herbert Samuel swathed as a Bedouin, or Sir Alfred Mond gaining a yet greater grandeur from the gorgeous and trailing robes of the East. If my image is quaint my intention is quite serious; and the point of it is not personal to any particular Jew. The point applies to 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 know where he is, which is in a foreign land.
This is but a parenthesis and a parable, but it brings us to the concrete controversial matter which is the Jewish problem. Only a few years ago it was regarded as a mark of a blood-thirsty disposition to admit that the Jewish problem was a problem, or even that the Jew was a Jew. Through much misunderstanding certain friends of mine and myself have persisted in disregarding the silence thus imposed; but facts have fought for us more effectively than words. By this time nobody is more conscious of the Jewish problem than the most intelligent and idealistic of the Jews. The folly of 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 fiction falsified the relations of everybody and everything, it is enough to note that it involved the Jews themselves in a quite new and quite needless unpopularity in the first years of the war. A poor little Jewish tailor, who called himself by a German name merely because he lived for a short time in a German town, was instantly mobbed 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 pair of shears. It was very unjust; quite as unjust as it would be to ask Bethmann-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 led him to call himself Bernstein when his name was Benjamin.
In such cases the Jews are accused of all sorts of faults they have not got; but there are faults that they have got. Some of the charges against them, as in the cases I have quoted concerning religious ritual and artistic taste, are due merely to the false light in which they are regarded. Other faults may also be due to the false position in which they are placed. But the faults exist; and nothing was ever more dangerous to everybody concerned than the recent fashion of denying or ignoring them. It was done simply by the snobbish habit of suppressing the experience and evidence of the majority of people, and especially of the majority of poor people. It was done by confining the controversy to a small world of wealth and refinement, remote from all the real facts involved. For the rich are the most ignorant people on earth, and the best that can be said for them, in cases like these, is that their ignorance often reaches the point of innocence.
I will take a typical case, which sums up the whole of this absurd fashion. There was a controversy in the columns of an important daily paper, some time ago, on the subject of the character of Shylock in Shakespeare. Actors and authors of 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 prejudices of his time from having a complete sympathy with Shylock. Some said that Shakespeare was only restrained by fear of the powers of his time from expressing his complete sympathy with Shylock. Some wondered how or why Shakespeare had got hold of such a queer story as that of the pound of flesh, and what it could possibly have to do with so dignified and intellectual a character as Shylock. In short, some wondered why a man of genius should be so much of an Anti-Semite, and some stoutly declared that he must have been a Pro-Semite. But all of them in a sense admitted that 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 human being even so much as mentioned the word “usury.” It is exactly as if twenty clever critics were set down to talk for a month about the play of Macbeth, and were all strictly forbidden to mention the 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 fashion to say that it is a clumsy and grotesque story; but as a fact it is an exceedingly good story. It is a perfect and pointed story for its purpose, which is to convey the moral of the story. And the moral 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 a man’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 very sound medieval laws, which set a limit on the usurer who was trying to take away a man’s livelihood, as the usurer in the play is trying to take away a man’s life. And if anybody thinks that usury can never 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 victims of money-lenders, or else one of the more powerful and influential rich who are money-lenders themselves.
All this, I say, is a fact that must be faced, but there is another side to 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 attempt to understand Shylock; in the true sense to sympathise with Shylock the money-lender, as he sympathised with Macbeth the murderer. It was not to deny that the man was an usurer, but to assert that the usurer was a man. And the Elizabethan dramatist does make him a man, where the medieval satirist made him a monster. Shakespeare not only makes him a man but a perfectly sincere 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 himself for 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 a rough and ready way. Regarding the Jew in relation to his ideas about 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 is to deny the disease.
To recognise the reality of the Jewish problem is very vital for everybody and especially vital for Jews. To pretend that there is no problem is to precipitate the expression of a rational impatience, which unfortunately can only express itself in the rather irrational form of Anti-Semitism. In the controversies of Palestine and Syria, for instance, it is very common to hear the answer that the Jew is no worse than the Armenian. The Armenian also is said to be unpopular as a money-lender and a mercantile upstart; yet the Armenian figures as 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 seriously suggested that we can substitute the Armenian for the Jew in the study of a world-wide problem like that of the Jews? Could we talk of the competition of Armenians among Welsh shop-keepers, or of the crowd of Armenians on Brighton Parade? Can Armenian usury be a common topic of talk in a camp in California and in a club in Piccadilly? Does Shakespeare show us a tragic Armenian towering over the great Venice of the Renascence? Does Dickens show us a realistic Armenian teaching in the thieves’ kitchens of the slums? When we meet Mr. Vernon Vavasour, that brilliant financier, do we speculate on the probability of his really having an Armenian name to match his Armenian nose? Is it true, in short, that all sorts of people, from the peasants of Poland to the peasants of Portugal, can agree more or less upon the special subject of Armenia? Obviously it is not in the least true; obviously the Armenian question is only a local question of certain Christians, who may be more avaricious than other Christians. But it is the truth about the Jews. It is only half the truth, and one which by itself would be very unjust to the Jews. But it is the truth, and we must realise it as sharply and clearly as we can. The truth is that it is rather strange that the Jews should be so anxious for international agreements. For one of the few really international agreements is a suspicion of the Jews.
A more practical comparison would be one between the Jews and 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 in different 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 largely the cause of Jewish usury or gipsy pilfering; but it is not common sense to contradict the general experience of gipsy pilfering or Jewish usury. The comparison helps us to clear away some of the cloudy evasions by which modern men have tried to escape from that experience. It is absurd to say that people are only prejudiced against the money methods of the Jews because the medieval church has left behind a hatred of their religion. We might as well say that people only protect the chickens from the gipsies because the medieval church undoubtedly condemned fortune-telling. It is unreasonable for a Jew to complain that 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 child as 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 a certain dignity and self-respect among the women of the Romany. But no student ever praised them for an exaggerated respect for private property, and the whole argument about gipsy theft can be roughly repeated about Hebrew usury. Above all, there is one other respect in which the comparison is even more to the point. It is the essential fact of the whole business, that the Jews do not become 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 peoples fails in the presence of the greater problem. Here again even the attempt at a parallel leaves the primary thing more unique. The gipsies do not become municipal merely by passing through a number of parishes, and it would seem equally obvious that a Jew need not become English merely 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 name of 123 Laburnam Road, Clapham. The municipal authorities generally notice the wheels attached to the new cottage, and therefore do not fall 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 made the mayor of an important industrial town must be comparatively rare. And if the poor vagabonds of the Romany blood are bullied by mayors and magistrates, kicked off the land by landlords, pursued by policemen and generally knocked about from pillar to post, nobody raises an outcry that they are the victims of religious persecution; nobody summons meetings in public halls, collects subscriptions or sends petitions to parliament; nobody threatens anybody else with the organised indignation of the gipsies all over the world. The case of the Jew in the nation is very different from that of the tinker in the town. The moral elements that can be appealed to are of a very different style and scale. No gipsies are millionaires.
In short, the Jewish problem differs from anything like the gipsy problem in two highly practical respects. First, the Jews already exercise colossal cosmopolitan financial power. And second, the modern societies they live in also grant them vital forms of national political power. Here the vagrant is already as rich as a miser and 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 same ending of the story; but the truth stated here is quite independent of 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 Jews are only a curious sect of Englishmen, like the Plymouth Brothers or the Seventh Day Baptists, in the face of such a simple fact as the family of Rothschild. Nobody can pretend that such an English sect can establish five brothers, or even cousins, in the five great capitals of Europe. Nobody can pretend that the Seventh 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 in Petrograd 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 patriotism thinking 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 bound to a man equally powerful in another nation, by ties more private and personal even than nationality. Even when the purpose is not any 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 highly civilised nation of the Jews.
For what may be criticised here as Anti-Semitism is only the negative side of Zionism. For the sake of convenience I have begun by stating it in terms of the universal popular impression which some call a popular prejudice. But such a truth of differentiation is equally true on both its different sides. Suppose somebody proposes to mix up England and America, under some absurd name like the Anglo-Saxon Empire. One man may say, “Why should the jolly English inns and villages be swamped by these priggish provincial Yankees?” Another may say, “Why should the real democracy of a young country be tied to your snobbish old squirarchy?” But both these views are only versions of the same view of a great American: “God never made one people good 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-Semitism and to the charge of Anti-Semitism. The usual phrases about religious 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 there may be other than superstitious reasons for their unpopularity. They are not obliged to maintain that when a Piccadilly dandy talks about being in the hands of the Jews he is moved by the theological fanaticism that prevails in Piccadilly; or that when a silly youth on Derby Day says he was done by a dirty Jew, he is merely conforming to that Christian orthodoxy which is one of the strict traditions of the Turf. They are not, like some other Jews, forced to pay so extravagant a compliment to the Christian religion as to suppose it the ruling motive 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 local pawn-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 remedy is practicable, we will try to consider later, with something like 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 due to the abnormal position of the Jews. They are traders rather than producers because they have no land of their own from which to produce, and they are cosmopolitans rather than patriots because they have no country of their own for which to be patriotic. They can no more become farmers while they are vagrant than they could have built the Temple of Solomon while they were building the Pyramids of Egypt. They can no more feel the full stream of nationalism while they wander in the desert of nomadism than they could bathe in the waters of Jordan while they were weeping by the waters of Babylon. For exile is the worst kind of bondage. In insisting upon that at least the Zionists have insisted upon a profound truth, with many applications to many other moral issues. It is true that for any one whose heart is set on a particular home 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 principle applies to the two Anti-Semitic arguments already considered. The first is the charge of usury and unproductive loans, the second the charge either of treason or of unpatriotic detachment. The charge of usury is regarded, not unreasonably, as only a specially dangerous development of the general charge of uncreative 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 simple communities like those of Palestine. A very honest Moslem Arab said to me, with a singular blend of simplicity and humour, “A Jew does 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 not all do the same? Why do we not also do this and become rich?” This is, I need hardly say, an over-simplification. Jews often work hard at some things, especially intellectual things. But the same experience which tells us that we have known many industrious Jewish 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 us that we have not known personally many patient Jewish ploughmen, many laborious Jewish blacksmiths, many active Jewish hedgers and 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 fashionable to say so in these days of democracy and self-determination. Jews do not generally work on the land, or in any of the handicrafts that are akin to the land; but the Zionists reply that this is because 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 dying with the nation. It is regarding the fatherland not merely as 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 Jews do not feel like this about their adopted country; and I doubt if the most intelligent of the Jews would pretend that they did. Even if we can bring ourselves to believe that Disraeli lived for 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. Eckstein had patriotic tears in his eyes when he obtained a gold concession from Queen Victoria, we cannot believe that in her absence he would have refused a similar concession from the German Emperor. When the Jew in France or in England says he is a good patriot he only means that he is a good citizen, and he would put it more truly if he said he was a good exile. Sometimes indeed he is an abominably bad citizen, and a most exasperating and execrable exile, but I am not talking of that side of the case. I am assuming that a man like Disraeli did really make a romance of England, that a man like Dernburg did really make a romance of Germany, and it is still true that though it was a romance, they would not have allowed it to be a tragedy. They would have seen 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 and last great truth in Zionism. Jerusalem was destroyed and Jews were destroyed with it, men who cared no longer to live because the city of their faith had fallen. It may be questioned whether all the Zionists have all the sublime insanity of the Zealots. But at least it is not nonsense to suggest that the Zionists might feel like this about Zion. It is nonsense to suggest that they would ever feel like this about Dublin or Moscow. And so far at least the truth both in Semitism and Anti-Semitism is 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 more of Nero the monster who killed his mother than of Nero the noble Roman who defeated Hannibal. The name of Julian more often suggests Julian the Apostate than Julian the Saint; though the latter crowned his canonisation with the sacred glory of being the patron saint of inn-keepers. But the best example of this unjust historical habit 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 call it a Christian name, except in the more evasive form of Jude. And even that, as the name of a more faithful apostle, is another illustration 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 wicked men these early Christians were!” was certainly more successful in innocence than in irony; for he seems to have been innocent or ignorant of the whole idea of the Christian communion. Judas Iscariot was 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 known everywhere merely as the name of a traitor. The name of Judas nearly always means Judas Iscariot; it hardly ever means Judas Maccabeus. And if you shout out “Judas” to a politician in the thick of a political tumult, you will have some difficulty in soothing him afterwards, with the assurance that you had merely traced in him something of that splendid zeal and valour which dragged down the tyranny of Antiochus, in the day of the great deliverance of Israel.
Those two possible uses of the name of Judas would give us yet another compact embodiment of the case for Zionism. Numberless international Jews have gained the bad name of Judas, and some have certainly earned it. If you have gained or earned the good name of Judas, it can quite fairly and intelligently be affirmed that this was not the 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 stories of mankind, there is no more perfect type of the element of chivalry in rebellion, than that magnificent tale of the Maccabee who stabbed from underneath the elephant of Antiochus and died under the fall of that huge and living castle. But it would be unreasonable to ask Mr. 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 therefore he naturally prefers to interest himself either in operations in silver or in somewhat slower and less efficient methods of liberation. In short, whatever we may think of the financial or social services such as were rendered to England in the affair of Marconi, or to France in the affair of Panama, it must be admitted that these exhibit a humbler and more humdrum type of civic duty, and do not remind us 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 national hero of nowhere; and for this particular type of patriotic passion it is necessary to have a patria. The Zionists therefore are maintaining a perfectly reasonable proposition, both about the charge of usury and the charge of treason, if they claim that both could be cured by the return to a national soil as promised in Zionism.
Unfortunately they are not always reasonable about their own reasonable proposition. Some of them have a most unlucky habit of ignoring, and therefore implicitly denying, the very evil that they are wisely trying to cure. I have already remarked this 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 this moment this first question is in every sense the primary question. Palestine has hardly as yet a patriotism to be betrayed; but it certainly has a peasantry to be oppressed, and especially to be oppressed as so many peasantries have been with usury and forestalling. The Syrians and Arabs and all the agricultural and pastoral populations of Palestine are, rightly or wrongly, alarmed and angered at the advent of the Jews to power; for the perfectly practical and simple reason 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 enormous and elementary a fact as that reputation and its natural results. It may or may not in this case be unjust; but in any case it is not unnatural. It may be the result of persecution, but it is one that has definitely resulted. It may be the consequence of a misunderstanding; but it is a misunderstanding that must itself be understood. Rightly or wrongly, certain people in Palestine fear the coming of the Jews as they fear the coming of the locusts; they regard them as parasites that feed on a community by a thousand methods of financial intrigue and economic exploitation. I could understand the Jews indignantly denying this, or eagerly disproving it, or best of all, explaining what is true in it while exposing 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 no such thing in the world.
I will give one curious example from one of the best and most brilliant of the Zionists. Dr. Weizmann is a man of large mind and human sympathies; and it is difficult to believe that any one with so fine a sense of humanity can be entirely empty of anything like a sense of humour. Yet, in the middle of a very temperate and magnanimous address on “Zionist Policy,” he can actually say a thing like this, “The Arabs need us with our knowledge, and our experience and our money. If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they will fall among sharks.” One is tempted for the moment to doubt whether any one else in the world could have said that, except the Jew with his strange mixture of brilliancy and blindness, of subtlety and simplicity. It is much as if President Wilson were to say, “Unless America deals with Mexico, it will be dealt with by some modern commercial power, that has trust-magnates and hustling millionaires.” But would President 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 put under 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 of sentence 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 will perhaps be in danger of massacres.” I suspect that a Turk would see the 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 the first thing to do is to discover what the Arabs are afraid of. And very little investigation will reveal the simple truth that they are very much afraid of sharks; and that in their book of symbolic or heraldic zoology it is the Jew who is adorned with the dorsal fin and the crescent of cruel teeth. This may be a fairy-tale about a 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 tribes are afraid, not only of the dorsal fin and dental arrangements which 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 respectable professor what he himself considers as his claims to respect. And as the imagery about the shark may be too metaphorical or almost mythological, there is not the smallest difficulty in stating 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 trickery and an experience of political intrigue, and the power given by 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 kind it has to be proved to be unjust. Feeling as I do the force of the real case for Zionism, I venture most earnestly to implore the Jews to disprove it, and not to dismiss it. But above all I implore them not to be content with assuring us again and 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 desire to enter Palestine like a Junker or drive thousands of Arabs forcibly out of the land; nobody supposes that Dr. Weizmann looks like a Junker; and nobody among the enemies of the Jews says that they have driven their foes in that fashion since the wars with the Canaanites. But for the Jews to reassure us by insisting on their own economic culture or commercial education is exactly like the Junkers reassuring us by insisting on the unquestioned supremacy of their Kaiser or the unquestioned obedience of their soldiers. Men bar themselves in their houses, or even hide themselves in 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 unpopular thing to answer with boasts, especially boasts of the very quality that 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 must not merely insist on the virtues the Jews do show, but rather deal with the particular virtues which they are generally accused of not showing. It is necessary to understand this more thoroughly than it is generally understood, and especially better than it is 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 of the Anti-Zionists know that they know it. And some of the phrases of the Zionists, such as those that I have noted, too often tend to 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 vision of sitting under their own vine and fig-tree, and even with its accompanying lesson that it is first necessary to grow the fig-tree and the vine.
The true test of Zionism may seem a topsy-turvy test. It will not succeed by the number of successes, but rather by the number of failures, or what the world (and certainly not least the Jewish world) has generally called failures. It will be tested, not by whether Jews can climb to the top of 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 positions of power and trust outside Israel, like Witte in Russia or Rufus Isaacs in England. It is generally bad, I think, for their adopted country; but in any case it is no good for the particular problem of their own country. Palestine cannot have a population of Prime Ministers and 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 enemies into hewers of wood and drawers of water. The modern Jews have to 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 kinds the most perilous and the most imperilled. Hence a Jewish state 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 success when 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 ease as an upper-gardener, a yokel who is still a yokel, or even a village idiot at least sufficiently idiotic to remain in his village, then indeed the world will come to blow the trumpets and lift up the heads of the everlasting gates; for God will have turned the captivity of Zion.
Zionists of whose sincerity I am personally convinced, and of whose intelligence anybody would be convinced, have told me that there really is, in places like Rishon, something like a beginning of this spirit; the love of the peasant for his land. One lady, even in expressing her conviction of it, called it “this very un-Jewish characteristic.” She was perfectly well aware both of the 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-turvy test I have suggested; that of whether men are worthy to be drudges. When a humorous and humane Jew thus accepts the test, and honestly expects the Jewish people to pass it, then I think the claim is very serious indeed, and one not lightly to be set aside. I do certainly think it a very serious responsibility under the circumstances to set it altogether aside. It is our whole complaint against 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 me a 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 love any of the lands in which he wanders; it seems rather indefensible to be deaf 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 long as his conduct on it was watched and tested according to the principles I 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 hundred men 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 soil belong to him. He must have the simplicity, and what many would call the stupidity of the peasant. He must not only call a spade a spade, but regard it as a spade and not as a speculation. By some true conversion the urban and modern man must be not only on the soil, but of the soil, and free from our urban trick of 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 Jew as a mere capitalist. The Jews explain it, however, by saying that the Arabs will work for a lower wage, and that this is necessarily a great temptation to the struggling colonists. In this they may be acting naturally as colonists, but it is none the less clear that they are not yet acting literally as labourers. It may not be their fault that they are not proving themselves to be peasants; but it is none the less clear that this situation in itself does not prove them to be peasants. So far as that is concerned, it still remains to be decided finally whether a Jew will be an agricultural 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 which many 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 reason already stated; that I think it intellectually unjust that any attempt of the Jews to regularise their position should merely be rejected as one of their irregularities. But I do not disguise the enormous difficulties of doing it in the particular conditions Of Palestine. In fact the greatest of the real difficulties of Zionism is that it has to take place in Zion. There are other difficulties, however, which when they are not specially the fault of Zionists are very much the fault of Jews. The worst is the general impression of a business pressure from the more brutal and businesslike type of Jew, which arouses very violent and very just indignation. When I was in Jerusalem it was openly said that Jewish financiers had complained of the low rate of interest at which loans were made by the government to the peasantry, and even that the government had yielded to them. If this were true it was a heavier reproach to the government even than to the Jews. But the general truth is that such a state of feeling seems to make the simple and solid patriotism 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 Zionists was suggested to me by Dr. Weizmann, who is a man not only highly intelligent but ardent and sympathetic. And the phrase he used gives 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 did not think Palestine could be a single and simple national territory quite in the sense of France; but he did not see why it should not be 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 itself more 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 meaning or no, clearly involves the abandonment of the solidarity of Palestine, and tolerates the idea of groups of Jews being separated from each other by populations of a different type. Now if once this notion be considered admissible, it seems to me capable of considerable extension. It seems possible that there might be not only Jewish cantons in Palestine but Jewish cantons outside Palestine, Jewish colonies in suitable and selected places 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 some great 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 without bothering about the site of the Temple. That they should have 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 place of sacrifice need even mean so much to that historic tradition as it would to many others. That the Jews should have some high place of dignity and ritual in Palestine, such as a great building like 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 remembers has a right.” The very worst of the Jews, as well as the very best, do in some sense remember. They are hated and persecuted and frightened 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 more we admire the manly and magnificent elements among the more vague and vagrant tribes of Palestine, the more we must admit that paradox. The unheroic have the heroic memory; and the heroic people have no memory.
But whatever the Jewish nation might wish to do about a national shrine or other supreme centre, the suggestion for the moment is that something like a Jewish territorial scheme might really be attempted, if we permit the Jews to be scattered no longer as individuals but as groups. It seems possible that by some such extension of the definition of Zionism we might ultimately overcome even the greatest difficulty of Zionism, the difficulty of resettling a sufficient number of so large a race on so small a land. For if the advantage of the ideal to the Jews is to gain the promised land, the advantage to the Gentiles is to get rid of the Jewish problem, and I do not see why we should obtain all their advantage and none of our own. Therefore I would leave as few Jews as possible in other established nations, and to these I 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 course the 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 give the same privileged position to all Jews everywhere, as an alternative policy to Zionism, if Zionism failed by the test I have named; the only true and the only tolerable test; if the Jews had not so much failed as peasants as succeeded as capitalists.
There is one word to be added; it will be noted that inevitably and even against some of my own desires, the argument has returned to that recurrent conclusion, which was found in the Roman Empire and the Crusades. The European can do justice to the Jew; but it must be the European who does it. Such a possibility as I have thrown out, and any other possibility that any one can think of, becomes at once impossible without some idea of a general suzerainty of Christendom over the lands of the Moslem and the Jew. Personally, I think it would be better if it were a general suzerainty of Christendom, rather than a particular supremacy of England. And I feel this, not from a desire to restrain the English power, but rather from a desire to defend it. I think there is not a little danger to England in the diplomatic situation involved; but that is a diplomatic question that it is neither within my power or duty to discuss adequately. But if I think it would be wiser for France and England together to 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 Jerusalem sitting 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 last and best attempt at a rationalistic theory of the Jew. We should be left facing a mystery which no other rationalism has ever come so near to providing within rational cause and cure. Whatever we do, we shall not return to that insular innocence and comfortable unconsciousness of Christendom, in which the Victorian agnostics could suppose that the Semitic problem was a brief medieval insanity. In this as in greater things, even if we lost our faith we could not recover our agnosticism. We can never recover agnosticism, any more than any other kind of ignorance. We know that there is a Jewish problem; we only hope that there is a Jewish solution. If there is not, there is no other. We cannot believe again that the Jew is an Englishman with certain theological theories, any more than we can believe again any other part of 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 we can 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 well as mysterious; that whether in the sense of the sorrows of Christ or of the sorrows of Cain, he must pass by, for he belongs to God.
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CONCLUSION
To have worn a large scallop shell in my hat in the streets of London might have been deemed ostentatious, to say nothing of carrying a staff like a long pole; and wearing sandals might have proclaimed rather that I had not come from Jerusalem but from Letchworth, which some identify with the New Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God. Lacking such attributes, I passed through South England as one who might have come from Ramsgate or from anywhere; and the only symbol left to me of my pilgrimage was a cheap ring of metal coloured like copper and brass. For on it was written in Greek characters the word “Jerusalem,” and though it may be less valuable than a brass nail, I do not think you can buy it in the Strand. All those enormous and everlasting things, all those gates of bronze and mosaics of purple and peacock colouring, all those chapels of gold and columns of crimson marble, had all shrivelled up and dwindled down to that one small thread of red metal round my finger. I could not help having a feeling, like Aladdin, that if I rubbed 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 impression of it is really rather changing, with its wandering tribes and its shifting sands, in which the genii of the East might well build the palace or the paradise of a day. As I saw the low and solid English cottages rising around me amid damp delightful thickets under rainy skies, I felt that in a deeper sense it is rather we 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 indescribable thought which had circled round my head through most of my journey; that Christendom is like a gigantic bronze come out of the furnace of the Near East; that in Asia is only the fire and in Europe the form. The nearest to what I mean was suggested in that very striking book Form and Colour, by Mr. March Philips. When I spoke of the idols of Asia, many moderns may well have murmured against 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 with the enthusiasm for a nice green or yellow idol, with nine arms and three heads, than with the philosophy ultimately represented by the snake devouring his tail; the awful sceptical argument in 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 one thing that has been in that mystical circle and broken out of it, and become something real as well. It has gone westward by a sort of centrifugal force, like a stone from a sling; and so made the 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 felt strongly disposed to take the privileges of one. I wanted to be entertained at the firesides of total strangers, in the medieval manner, and to tell them interminable tales of my travels. I wanted to linger in Dover, and try it on the citizens of that town. I nearly got out of the train at several wayside stations, where I saw secluded cottages 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 travels that seemed in comparison as vast as the spaces between the stars. The hop-fields of Kent seemed to me like outlying parts of my own kitchen 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 dropping over the beechwoods and the white cross-roads. The distance seemed to grow deeper and richer with darkness as I went up the long lanes towards my home; and in that distance, as I drew nearer, I heard the barking of a dog.
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THE END
CHAPTER I
THE WAY OF THE CITIES
It was in the season of Christmas that I came out of my little garden in that “field of the beeches” between the Chilterns and the Thames, and began to walk backwards through history to the place from which Christmas came. For it is often necessary to walk backwards, as a man on 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 name of his destination, and has to go back whence he came, even to find out where 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 mind the true map of the modern wanderings; but whether I shall be able to say anything of what I saw, this story must show.
I had said farewell to all my friends, or all those with my own limited number of legs; and nothing living remained but a dog and a donkey. The reader will learn with surprise that my first feeling of fellowship went out to the dog; I am well aware that I lay open my guard to a lunge of 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 the moment there was rather a moral contrast than a pictorial parallel. For the dog did indeed seem to stand for home and everything I was leaving behind me, with reluctance, especially that season of the year. For one thing, he is named after Mr. Winkle, the Christmas guest of Mr. Wardle; and there is indeed something Dickensian in his union of domesticity with exuberance. He jumped about me, barking like a 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 not their due honour in the East; and this seemed to sharpen my sense of my own domestic sentinel as a sort of symbol of the West. On the other hand, the East is full of donkeys, often very dignified donkeys; and when I turned my attention to the other grotesque 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 up so 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 East after all. The dog’s very lawlessness is but an extravagance of 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 world is full of fantastic forms of animal worship; a religion generally accompanied with human sacrifice. Yet we hear strangely little of the real merits of animals; and one of them surely is this innocence of 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 cannot claim 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 this power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely things that 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 Scripture by 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 man in a day. I wish this fact were more often remembered, in judging whether really poor men have really been cruel to donkeys. But I assure the reader that I am not cruel to my donkey; the cruelty is 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 me that many of us, in just detestation of the dirty trick of cruelty to 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 field every morning; and suppose my secretary always kicked me by way of beginning the day’s work; I wonder whether that day’s work would resume its normal course as if nothing had happened. Nothing graver than these grotesque images and groping speculations would come into my conscious mind just then, though at the back of it there was an indescribable sense of regret and parting. All through my wanderings the dog remained in my memory as a Dickensian and domestic emblem of England; and if it is difficult to 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-woods and the silver cross of the cross-roads. For the four roads that meet in the market-place of my little town make one of the largest and simplest of such outlines on the map of England; and the shape as it shines 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 combination of liberty and limitation which we call choice. A man is entirely free 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.
CAPITOLO I
LA VIA DELLE CITTÀ
Fu nella stagione del Natale che uscii dal mio piccolo giardino in quel «campo dei faggi» tra i Chiltern e il Tamigi, e cominciai a camminare a ritroso attraverso la storia fino al luogo da cui venne il Natale. Poiché spesso è necessario camminare a ritroso, come un uomo che ha sbagliato strada torna a un cartello per ritrovare la strada giusta. L’uomo moderno somiglia piuttosto a un viaggiatore che ha dimenticato il nome della propria destinazione, e deve tornare donde è venuto, anche solo per scoprire dove sta andando. Che il mondo abbia smarrito la via pochi ormai lo negheranno; e mi parve davvero di trovare alla fine una sorta di cartello, di forma singolare e significativa, e di scorgere per un istante nella mia mente la vera mappa dei vagabondaggi moderni; ma se sarò capace di dire qualcosa di ciò che vidi, questo racconto dovrà mostrarlo.
Avevo detto addio a tutti i miei amici, o almeno a tutti quelli forniti del mio medesimo limitato numero di gambe; e nulla di vivente restava se non un cane e un asino. Il lettore apprenderà con sorpresa che il mio primo sentimento di cameratismo andò al cane; sono ben consapevole di scoprire il fianco a una stoccata di spirito. Il cane assomiglia piuttosto a un asino, o a una sua piccola caricatura, con una grossa testa nera e lunghe orecchie nere; ma nell’umore del momento vi era piuttosto un contrasto morale che un parallelo pittorico. Poiché il cane sembrava davvero rappresentare la casa e tutto ciò che mi lasciavo alle spalle, con riluttanza, specialmente in quella stagione dell’anno. Anzitutto, porta il nome del signor Winkle, l’ospite natalizio del signor Wardle; e vi è in effetti qualcosa di dickensiano nella sua unione di domesticità ed esuberanza. Mi saltava attorno, abbaiando come una piccola batteria, nella convinzione che stessi andando a passeggio; ma non potevo, ahimè, portarlo con me in una passeggiata fino in Palestina. Per inciso, sarebbe stato fuori posto; poiché i cani non godono del onore loro dovuto in Oriente; e questo pareva acuire in me il senso della mia sentinella domestica come una sorta di simbolo dell’Occidente. D’altra parte, l’Oriente è pieno di asini, spesso asini assai dignitosi; e quando rivolsi la mia attenzione all’altro grottesco quadrupede, dalla testa ancor più grande e dalle orecchie ancor più lunghe, egli parve assumere una profonda sfumatura di mistero orientale. Non so perché queste due assurde creature s’intricassero tanto nel mio filo di pensiero, come draghi in un testo miniato; o si ergessero come gargolle ai due lati del portale della mia avventura. Ma in verità esse erano, in un certo senso, simboli dell’Occidente e dell’Oriente, dopotutto. La stessa sregolatezza del cane non è che una stravaganza di fedeltà; impazzisce di gioia tre volte nello stesso giorno, all’idea di uscire a passeggio lungo la stessa strada. Il mondo moderno è pieno di fantastiche forme di culto degli animali; una religione generalmente accompagnata da sacrifici umani. Eppure stranamente poco udiamo dei veri meriti degli animali; e uno di essi è certamente questa innocenza da ogni noia; forse una tale semplicità è l’assenza di peccato. Ho anch’io un certo senso del sacro dovere della sorpresa; e del bisogno di vedere la vecchia strada come una strada nuova. Ma non posso pretendere che ogni volta che esco a passeggio con la mia famiglia e i miei amici, mi precipiti dinanzi a loro lanciando vocianti grida di felicità; o addirittura salti loro attorno tentando di leccar loro il volto. È in questa facoltà di ricominciare con energia dalle cose familiari e casalinghe che il cane è davvero il tipo eterno della civiltà occidentale. E l’asino è davvero tanto diverso quanto lo è la civiltà orientale. La sua stessa anarchia è una sorta di segretezza; la sua stessa rivolta è un segreto. Non balza in piedi perché desideri condividere la mia passeggiata, ma per seguire la propria via, solitario come l’onagro selvaggio della Scrittura. La mia stessa bestia da soma avvalora l’autorità della Scrittura essendo un asino quanto mai selvaggio. Gli ho dato il nome di Trotsky, perché di rado trotta, ma o corre a precipizio o se ne sta immobile. Corre per tutto il campo quando è necessario acchiapparlo, e resta immobile quando è davvero urgente spingerlo avanti. Inoltre abbatte steccati, mangia ortaggi e assolve altre funzioni; tra ritardi e distruzioni potrebbe rovinare un uomo davvero povero in un solo giorno. Vorrei che tale fatto fosse ricordato più spesso, nel giudicare se uomini davvero poveri siano stati davvero crudeli con gli asini. Ma assicuro il lettore che io non sono crudele col mio asino; la crudeltà è tutta dalla parte opposta. Egli scalcia chi cerca di acchiapparlo; e di nuovo mi assilla un vago parallelo umano. Poiché mi sembra che molti di noi, nella giusta avversione al sudicio vizio della crudeltà verso gli animali, abbiano in realtà moltissima pazienza con gli animali; più pazienza, temo, di quanta molti di noi ne abbiano con gli esseri umani. Si supponga che ogni mattina io dovessi uscire ad acchiappare il mio segretario in un campo; e si supponga che il mio segretario mi scalciasse sempre a mo’ di inizio del lavoro quotidiano; mi domando se quel lavoro quotidiano riprenderebbe il suo corso normale come se nulla fosse accaduto. Nulla di più grave di queste grottesche immagini e di questi brancolanti ragionamenti mi affiorava allora alla mente cosciente, benché sul fondo di essa vi fosse un indescrivibile senso di rimpianto e di distacco. Per tutti i miei vagabondaggi il cane rimase nella mia memoria come emblema dickensiano e domestico dell’Inghilterra; e se è difficile prendere sul serio un asino, dovrebbe essere quanto mai facile, almeno, per un uomo che è diretto a Gerusalemme.
Vi era una nube di tempo natalizio sui grandi boschi grigi di faggi e sull’argentea croce del crocevia. Poiché le quattro strade che si incontrano nella piazza del mercato della mia cittadina formano uno dei più ampi e semplici tra tali disegni sulla carta d’Inghilterra; e quella forma, così come risplende su quella mappa boscosa, mi tocca sempre in modo singolare. La vista del crocevia è, in senso vero, il segno della croce. Poiché è il segno di una cosa autenticamente cristiana; quella netta combinazione di libertà e limitazione che chiamiamo scelta. Un uomo è interamente libero di scegliere tra destra e sinistra, o tra il giusto e l’ingiusto. Mentre guardavo per l’ultima volta le pallide strade sotto il carico di nubi, seppi che la nostra civiltà era davvero giunta al crocevia. Man mano che i sentieri si facevano più fiochi, svanendo sotto l’ombra incombente, mi sentii piuttosto come se essa avesse smarrito la via in una foresta.
It was at the time when people were talking about some menace of the end of the world, not apocalyptic but astronomical; and the cloud that covered the little town of Beaconsfield might have fitted in with such a fancy. It faded, however, as I left the place further behind; and in London the weather, though wet, was comparatively clear. It was almost as if Beaconsfield had a domestic day of judgment, and an end of the world all to itself. In a sense Beaconsfield has four ends of the world, for its four 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 at once ultimate and infinite. The very title of London End sounds like the other end of nowhere, or (what is worse) of everywhere. It suggests a sort of derisive riddle; where does London End? As I came up through the vast vague suburbs, it was this sense of London as 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 amount of mental and moral fog. The whole industrial world symbolised by London had reached a curious complication and confusion, not easy to parallel in human history. It is not a question of controversies, but rather of cross-purposes. As I went by Charing Cross my eye caught a poster about Labour politics, with something about the threat of Direct Action and a demand for 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 cut across 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 advertised in large letters on the sky cannot plead the shy privileges of privacy. Meanwhile the Labour men talk about the need to “nationalise” the mines or the land, as if it were not the great difficulty in a plutocracy to 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 and state 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 are with the Socialists; in so far that there is something to be said 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 nonsensical a situation as that in which the strikers demand Government control and the Government denounces its own control as anarchy. The mob howls before the palace gates, “Hateful tyrant, we demand that you assume 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 large misunderstanding everywhere; a misunderstanding amounting to a mess. And as this was the last impression that London left on me, so it was the impression I carried with me about the whole modern problem of 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 return to our first principles in philosophy. We must consider how we came to be doing what we do, and even saying what we say. As it is, the very terms we use are either meaningless or something more than meaningless, inconsistent even with themselves. This applies, for instance, to the talk of both sides in 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 at all 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 different from what they say; and even this verbal inconsistency, this mere welter of words, is a sign of the common confusion of thought. It is this sort of thing that made London seem like a limbo of lost words, and possibly of lost wits. And it is here we find the value of what I have called walking backwards through history.
It is one of the rare merits of modern mechanical travel that it enables us to compare widely different cities in rapid succession. The stages of my own progress were the chief cities of separate 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 it was 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 it did really begin to clarify the confusion of names and notions in modern society. I first became conscious of this when I went 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 is supposed to be democratic, or supposed to be trying to be democratic. The ninth century, the time of the Norse invasions, was not saintly in the sense of being filled with saints; it was filled with pirates and petty tyrants, and the first feudal anarchy. But sanctity was 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 dream of the dark age of industrialism; if it be very much of a dream. It is this which prophets promise to achieve, and politicians pretend to achieve, and poets sometimes desire to achieve, and sometimes only desire to desire. In a word, an equal citizenship is quite the reverse of the reality in the modern world; but it is still the 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 la Bastille be indeed the spirit of liberty, it must see a million growths in a modern city to make it wish to fly back again into heaven. But our secular society would not know what goddess to put on the pillar in its place.
Era il tempo in cui si parlava di una certa minaccia della fine del mondo, non apocalittica ma astronomica; e la nube che copriva la cittadina di Beaconsfield avrebbe potuto ben accordarsi con una simile fantasia. Essa si dissolse, tuttavia, man mano che mi lasciavo il luogo alle spalle; e a Londra il tempo, per quanto piovoso, era relativamente sereno. Era quasi come se Beaconsfield avesse un suo domestico giorno del giudizio, e una fine del mondo tutta per sé. In un certo senso Beaconsfield ha quattro fini del mondo, poiché i suoi quattro angoli sono chiamati «capi» dal nome delle quattro città più vicine. Ma io mi interessavo soltanto di quello chiamato Londra End; e il nome stesso era come la visione di qualcosa di vano, insieme ultimo e infinito. Il titolo stesso di Londra End suona come l’altro capo del nessun luogo, o (ciò che è peggio) di ogni luogo. Suggerisce una sorta di indovinello beffardo: dove finisce Londra? Mentre risalivo attraverso i vasti e vaghi sobborghi, era questo senso di Londra come un guazzabuglio informe e senza fine a riempirmi soprattutto la mente. Mi pareva di portare ancora con me la nube; e quando alzavo lo sguardo, quasi mi aspettavo di vedere i comignoli aggrovigliati come gli alberi.
E in verità se ora non v’era più nebbia materiale, ve n’era in abbondanza di quella mentale e morale. L’intero mondo industriale simboleggiato da Londra aveva raggiunto una curiosa complicazione e confusione, non facile da eguagliare nella storia umana. Non è questione di controversie, ma piuttosto di propositi incrociati. Passando accanto a Charing Cross, il mio occhio colse un manifesto sulla politica laburista, con qualcosa sulla minaccia dell’Azione Diretta e una richiesta di Nazionalizzazione. E del tutto a prescindere dai meriti della questione, mi colpì che dopo tutto l’azione diretta è assai indiretta, e la cosa richiesta è a molti passi di distanza dalla cosa desiderata. È tutto parte di una sorta di groviglio, in cui i termini e le cose si incrociano gli uni con le altre. I datori di lavoro parlano di «impresa privata», come se vi fosse qualcosa di privato nell’impresa moderna. I loro consorzi sono grandi quanto molti Stati; e le cose reclamizzate a grandi lettere nel cielo non possono invocare i timidi privilegi della privatezza. Intanto gli uomini del Labour parlano della necessità di «nazionalizzare» le miniere o la terra, come se non fosse la grande difficoltà, in una plutocrazia, nazionalizzare il Governo, o persino nazionalizzare la nazione. I Capitalisti lodano la concorrenza mentre creano il monopolio; i Socialisti spingono a uno sciopero per trasformare gli operai in soldati e funzionari di Stato; il che è logicamente uno sciopero contro gli scioperi. Lo cito soltanto come esempio della sconcertante incoerenza, e per nessun fine polemico. Le mie simpatie personali sono con i Socialisti; nella misura in cui qualcosa si può dire a favore del Socialismo, e nulla si può dire a favore del Capitalismo. Ma il punto è che quando c’è qualcosa da dire a favore di una cosa, oggi la si dice comunemente a sostegno della cosa opposta. Mai, da quando la folla gridò «Meno pane! Più tasse!» nella storiella insensata, vi è stata una situazione così davvero priva di senso come quella in cui gli scioperanti reclamano il controllo del Governo e il Governo denuncia il proprio controllo come anarchia. La folla urla davanti alle porte del palazzo: «Odioso tiranno, esigiamo che tu assuma poteri più dispotici»; e il tiranno tuona dal balcone: «Vili ribelli, osate suggerire che i miei poteri debbano essere estesi?». Sembra esserci un piccolo malinteso da qualche parte.
In verità tutto ciò che vedevo mi diceva che vi era ovunque un grande malinteso; un malinteso che si risolveva in un pasticcio. E poiché questa fu l’ultima impressione che Londra mi lasciò, così fu l’impressione che portai con me riguardo all’intero problema moderno della civiltà occidentale, come un indovinello da decifrare o un nodo da sciogliere. Per scioglierlo è necessario afferrarne il capo giusto, e specialmente l’altro capo. Dobbiamo cominciare dal principio; dobbiamo tornare alle nostre prime origini nella storia, come dobbiamo tornare ai nostri primi principi nella filosofia. Dobbiamo considerare come siamo giunti a fare ciò che facciamo, e persino a dire ciò che diciamo. Così com’è, i termini stessi che usiamo o sono privi di senso o sono qualcosa di più che privo di senso, incoerenti persino con sé stessi. Ciò vale, per esempio, per il discorso di entrambe le parti in quella controversia laburista, che ho colto soltanto di passaggio, perché era la controversia del momento a Londra quando partii. I Capitalisti dicono Bolscevismo come si potrebbe dire Boojum. È semplicemente una parola mistica e fantastica che suggerisce orrore. Ma potrebbe significare molte cose; comprese alcune cose giuste e razionali. D’altra parte, non potrebbe mai esserci alcun senso nella frase «la dittatura del proletariato». È come dire «l’onnipotenza dei bigliettai d’omnibus». È abbastanza ovvio che se un bigliettaio d’omnibus fosse onnipotente, probabilmente preferirebbe condurre qualcos’altro oltre a un omnibus. Qualunque cosa intendano i suoi fautori, è chiaramente qualcosa di diverso da ciò che dicono; e persino questa incoerenza verbale, questo mero guazzabuglio di parole, è segno della comune confusione del pensiero. È questo genere di cose che faceva sembrare Londra un limbo di parole perdute, e forse di senni perduti. Ed è qui che troviamo il valore di ciò che ho chiamato camminare all’indietro attraverso la storia.
È uno dei rari meriti del moderno viaggio meccanico quello di consentirci di paragonare in rapida successione città assai diverse. Le tappe del mio proprio itinerario furono le città principali di paesi distinti; e sebbene si perda di più tralasciando i paesi, qualcosa si guadagna nel contrapporre così nettamente le capitali. E ancora, fu uno dei vantaggi del mio itinerario che esso fosse un procedere all’indietro; che accadesse, come ho detto, di ripercorrere il corso della storia verso cose sempre più antiche; verso Parigi e verso Roma e verso l’Egitto, e quasi, per così dire, fino all’Eden. E infine è uno dei vantaggi di un tale ritorno che esso cominciò davvero a chiarire la confusione di nomi e nozioni nella società moderna. Ne divenni per la prima volta consapevole quando uscii dalla Gare de Lyon e camminai lungo una fila di caffè, finché rividi una lontana colonna coronata da una figura danzante; la libertà che danzava sopra la caduta della Bastiglia. Qui almeno, pensai, vi è un’origine e un criterio, quali mi erano mancati nel mero garbuglio dell’opportunismo industriale. Il moderno mondo industriale non è affatto democratico; ma si suppone che sia democratico, o che stia cercando di essere democratico. Il nono secolo, il tempo delle invasioni normanne, non fu santo nel senso di essere colmo di santi; fu colmo di pirati e di piccoli tiranni, e della prima anarchia feudale. Ma la santità era l’unico ideale che quei barbari avessero, quando ne avevano uno qualsiasi. E la democrazia è l’unico ideale che i milioni industriali abbiano, quando ne hanno uno qualsiasi. La santità fu la luce dei Secoli Bui, o se volete il sogno dei Secoli Bui. E la democrazia è il sogno del secolo buio dell’industrialismo; se pure è granché un sogno. È questo che i profeti promettono di realizzare, e i politici fingono di realizzare, e i poeti talvolta desiderano realizzare, e talvolta soltanto desiderano desiderare. In una parola, una cittadinanza eguale è proprio il contrario della realtà nel mondo moderno; ma è ancora l’ideale nel mondo moderno. In ogni caso non ha altro ideale. Se la figura che si è posata sulla colonna nella Place de la Bastille è davvero lo spirito della libertà, essa deve vedere un milione di escrescenze in una città moderna tali da farle desiderare di rivolare in cielo. Ma la nostra società laica non saprebbe quale dea porre sul pilastro al suo posto.
As I looked at that sculptured goddess on that classical column, my mind went back another historic stage, and I asked myself where this classic and republican ideal came from, and the answer was equally clear. The place from which it had come was the place to which I was going; Rome. And it was not until I had reached Rome that I adequately realised the next great reality that simplified the 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 brick and stone, that small rock that rose and overshadowed the whole earth; the Capitol. Here in the grey dawn of our history sat the strong Republic that set her foot upon the necks of kings; and it was from here assuredly that the spirit of the Republic flew like an eagle to 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 sometimes called the anarchy of Paris. The expansion of the Roman Empire was accompanied by a sort of permanent Roman Revolution, fully as furious as the French Revolution. So long as the Roman system was really 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 were among them some that further aided the solution of the problem. I saw the larger achievements of the later Romans; and the lesson that 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 and of energy in the British Empire. I saw the Baths of Caracalla, witnessing to a cult of cleanliness, adduced also to prove the luxury of Ancient Romans and the simplicity of Anglo-Saxons. All it really 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 number of people to do the work of the world first, before it allowed more 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 scheme like Socialism. Sometimes very like Socialism.
Only standing idly on one of those grassy mounds under one of those 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 side was right, or what solution was reliable, or any partisan points or 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 a peak 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 Paris without the slavery of Rome. Between the Roman Republic and the French Republic something had happened. Whatever else it was, it was the abandonment of the ancient and fundamental human habit of slavery; the numbering of men for necessary labour as the normal foundation of society, even a society in which citizens were free and equal. When the idea of equal citizenship returned to the world, it found that 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 getting the work of the world done somehow. We have now to assume not only that all citizens are equal, but that all men are citizens. Capitalism attempted it by combining political equality with economic inequality; it assumed the rich could always hire the poor. But Capitalism seems to me to have collapsed; to be not only a discredited ethic but a bankrupt business. Whether we shall return to pagan slavery, or to small property, or by guilds or 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 green mound 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 happened between the rise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the French Republic? Why did the equal citizens of the first take it for granted that there would be slaves? Why did the equal citizens of 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 that when equality returned, it was no longer the equality of citizens, and had to be the equality of men? The answer is that this equality of men is in more senses than one a mystery. It is a mystery which I pondered as I stood in the corridor of the train going south from Rome. It was at daybreak, and (as it happened) before any one else had risen, that I looked out of the long row of windows across a 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 eaves of 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 such a 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 be going due east, as if disappearing into the sun; and save for the noise of 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 marked out 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 was myself only half-awake. It is common in such a case to see some new signal or landmark; but in my experience it is rather the things already 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 name of the magic which had made all those peasants out of pagan slaves, and has presented to the modern world a new problem of labour and liberty. It was as if I already saw against the clouds of 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.
Mentre guardavo quella dea scolpita su quella colonna classica, la mia mente risalì a un’altra tappa storica, e mi chiesi da dove venisse questo ideale classico e repubblicano, e la risposta era ugualmente chiara. Il luogo da cui esso era venuto era il luogo verso cui mi dirigevo: Roma. E fu solo quando ebbi raggiunto Roma che compresi adeguatamente la successiva grande realtà che semplificava l’intera vicenda, e persino questa particolare parte della vicenda. Non conosco nulla di più bruscamente sconvolgente di quell’improvvisa ripidezza, come di strade che scalano il cielo, dove sorge, ora rivestita di tegole, mattoni e pietra, quella piccola rupe che si levò e adombrò l’intera terra: il Campidoglio. Qui, nella grigia alba della nostra storia, sedeva la forte Repubblica che pose il piede sul collo dei re; e fu certamente da qui che lo spirito della Repubblica volò come un’aquila per posarsi su quel lontano pilastro nel paese dei Galli. Poiché si dovrebbe ricordare (e troppo spesso si dimentica) che se Parigi ereditò ciò che si può chiamare l’autorità di Roma, è ugualmente vero che Roma anticipò tutto ciò che talvolta si chiama l’anarchia di Parigi. L’espansione dell’Impero Romano fu accompagnata da una sorta di permanente Rivoluzione Romana, furiosa quanto la Rivoluzione Francese. Finché il sistema romano fu davvero forte, fu pieno di tumulti e folle e divisioni democratiche; e innumerevoli Bastiglie caddero mentre il tempio delle vittorie sorgeva. Ma per quanto io avessi soltanto un’occhiata frettolosa a tali cose, ve n’erano tra esse alcune che ulteriormente aiutavano la soluzione del problema. Vidi le maggiori realizzazioni dei Romani più tardi; e la lezione che ancora mancava era chiaramente lì. Vidi il Colosseo, monumento di quell’amore di assistere agli sport atletici, che viene notato come segno di decadenza nell’Impero Romano e di energia nell’Impero Britannico. Vidi le Terme di Caracalla, testimonianza di un culto della pulizia, addotto anch’esso a provare il lusso degli Antichi Romani e la semplicità degli Anglosassoni. Tutto ciò che realmente prova, in un senso o nell’altro, è un amore del lavarsi su vasta scala; il che potrebbe semplicemente indicare che Caracalla, come altri Imperatori, era un pazzo. Ma in verità ciò che tali cose indicano, sia pure indirettamente, è qualcosa che qui è molto più importante. Esse indicano non solo una sincerità nello spirito pubblico, ma una certa scorrevolezza nei servizi pubblici. In una parola, mentre vi furono molte rivoluzioni, non vi furono scioperi. I cittadini erano spesso ribelli; ma vi erano uomini che non erano ribelli, perché non erano cittadini. Il mondo antico costringeva un certo numero di persone a compiere prima il lavoro del mondo, prima di permettere a persone più privilegiate di combattere per il governo del mondo. La verità è abbastanza trita, naturalmente; sta nella singola parola Schiavitù, che non è il nome di un delitto come la Simonia, ma piuttosto di un sistema come il Socialismo. Talvolta molto simile al Socialismo.
Solo standomene oziosamente su uno di quei tumuli erbosi sotto uno di quegli archi spezzati, vidi improvvisamente il problema del Lavoro di Londra, come non potevo vederlo a Londra. Non voglio dire che vidi quale parte avesse ragione, o quale soluzione fosse affidabile, o alcun punto o replica di parte, o alcun dettaglio pratico circa le difficoltà pratiche. Voglio dire che vidi che cos’era: la cosa stessa e la cosa intera. Il problema del Lavoro d’oggi si ergeva assai semplicemente, come una vetta a cui un uomo si volge indietro e vede unica e solida, benché, quando la stava attraversando, fosse una landa desolata di rocce. Il problema del Lavoro è il tentativo di avere la democrazia di Parigi senza la schiavitù di Roma. Tra la Repubblica Romana e la Repubblica Francese qualcosa era accaduto. Qualunque altra cosa fosse, fu l’abbandono dell’antica e fondamentale abitudine umana della schiavitù: l’enumerazione degli uomini per il lavoro necessario come normale fondamento della società, anche di una società in cui i cittadini erano liberi e uguali. Quando l’idea dell’eguale cittadinanza tornò nel mondo, trovò quel mondo mutato da una versione assai più misteriosa dell’uguaglianza. Cosicché Londra, tramandando la lampada da Parigi così come da Roma, si trova di fronte a un nuovo problema che tocca l’antica pratica di far compiere in qualche modo il lavoro del mondo. Ora dobbiamo assumere non solo che tutti i cittadini siano uguali, ma che tutti gli uomini siano cittadini. Il Capitalismo lo tentò combinando l’uguaglianza politica con la disuguaglianza economica; presupponeva che i ricchi potessero sempre assoldare i poveri. Ma il Capitalismo mi sembra essere crollato; essere non solo un’etica screditata ma un affare fallito. Se torneremo alla schiavitù pagana, o alla piccola proprietà, o se per mezzo di corporazioni o altrimenti ci metteremo all’opera in un modo nuovo, non è la questione qui. La questione qui era quella che mi ponevo standomene su quel verde tumulo accanto al giallo fiume; e la sua risposta giaceva davanti a me, lungo la strada che correva verso il sole nascente.
Che cosa fece la differenza? Che cosa era accaduto tra il sorgere della Repubblica Romana e il sorgere della Repubblica Francese? Perché gli eguali cittadini della prima davano per scontato che vi sarebbero stati schiavi? Perché gli eguali cittadini della seconda davano per scontato che non vi sarebbero stati schiavi? Come era scomparsa questa istituzione immemorabile nell’intervallo, così che nessuno neppure la sognava o la proponeva? Come mai, quando l’uguaglianza tornò, essa non era più l’uguaglianza dei cittadini, e doveva essere l’uguaglianza degli uomini? La risposta è che questa uguaglianza degli uomini è, in più sensi d’uno, un mistero. È un mistero che meditavo mentre stavo nel corridoio del treno che andava a sud da Roma. Era all’alba, e (come accadde) prima che alcun altro si fosse alzato, che guardai fuori dalla lunga fila di finestre attraverso un grande paesaggio grigio d’ulivi e ancora scuro contro l’alba. L’alba stessa somigliava piuttosto a una fila di meravigliose finestre; una linea di basse imposte spalancate e splendenti sotto le gronde di nuvole. Vi era una curiosa limpidezza nel sorgere del sole; come se il suo sole fosse fatto di vetro piuttosto che d’oro. Era la prima volta che vedevo così da vicino e ricoprire un tale paesaggio le grigie volute e il canuto fogliame dell’ulivo; e tutti quegli alberi contorti passavano come una danza di draghi in un sogno. Il treno oscillante e la linea ferroviaria che svaniva sembravano andare diritti a oriente, come se sparissero dentro il sole; e salvo il rumore del treno non vi era alcun suono in tutta quella solitudine grigia e d’argento; nemmeno il suono di un uccello. Eppure le piantagioni erano per lo più delimitate in appezzamenti privati e recavano ogni traccia della cura di proprietari privati. È di rado, lo confesso, che colgo così il mondo addormentato, né so perché la mia risposta dovesse venirmi in tal modo mentre io stesso ero soltanto mezzo desto. È comune in tal caso vedere qualche nuovo segnale o punto di riferimento; ma nella mia esperienza sono piuttosto le cose già divenute familiari che d’un tratto divengono strane e significative. Un milione di ulivi dev’essere passato in un lampo prima che io vedessi il primo ulivo; il primo, per così dire, che davvero agitò il ramo d’ulivo. Poiché ricordai infine verso quale terra andavo; e conoscevo il nome della magia che aveva fatto tutti quei contadini da schiavi pagani, e ha presentato al mondo moderno un nuovo problema di lavoro e libertà. Era come se già vedessi contro le nubi dell’alba quel monte che prende il suo nome dall’ulivo: e ritta, semivisibile su di esso, una figura che non guardavo. Ex oriente lux; e sapevo quale alba era spuntata sulle rovine di Roma.
I have taken but this one text or label, out of a hundred such, the matter of labour and liberty; and thought it worth while to trace it from one blatant and bewildering yellow poster in the London streets to its high places in history. But it is only one example of the way in which a thousand things grouped themselves and fell into perspective as I passed farther and farther 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 too much of a puzzle even to be a problem. For instance, a friend of mine described his book, The Path to Rome, as a journey through all Europe that the Faith had saved; and I might very well describe my own journey as one through all Europe that the War has saved. The trail of the actual fighting, of course, was awfully apparent everywhere; the plantations of pale crosses seemed to crop up on every side like growing things; and the first French villages through which I passed had heard in the distance, day and night, the guns of the long battle-line, like the breaking of an endless exterior sea of night upon the very borderland of the world. I felt it most as we passed the noble towers of Amiens, so near the high-water mark of the high tide of barbarism, in that night of terror just before the turning of the tide. For the truth which thus grew clearer with travel is rightly represented by the metaphor of the artillery, as the thunder and surf of a sea beyond the world. Whatever else the war was, it was like the resistance of something as 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 or vision of it seemed to clarify itself more and more as I went on. It was the defence of that same ancient enclosure in which stood the broken columns of the Roman forum and the column in the Paris square, and of all other such enclosures down to the domestic enclosures 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 West had again proved too strong for the wild dogs of the Orient. For the foes of such creative limits are chaos and old night, whether they are the Northern barbarism that pitted tribal pride and brutal drill against the civic ideal of Paris, or the Eastern barbarism that brought brigands 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 and larger than all the disputed details about the war and the peace. A man may think it extraordinary, as I do, that the natural dissolution of the artificial German Empire into smaller states should have actually been prevented by its enemies, when it was already accepted in despair by its friends. For we are now trying hard to hold the Prussian system together, having hammered hard for four mortal years 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 should clear the Turks out of Turkey, but leave them in Constantinople. For that is driving the barbarians from their own rude tillage and 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 simpler truth will still be there. It was that the weeds and wild things 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 line has been drawn somewhere and a clearance has been made somehow. The ancient plan of our city has been saved; a city at least capable of containing citizens. I felt this in the chance relics of the war itself; I felt it twenty times more in those older relics which even the war had never touched at all; I felt the change as much in the changeless East as in the ever-changing West. I felt it when I crossed another great square in Paris to look at a certain statue, which I had last seen hung with crape and such garlands as we give the dead; but on whose plain pedestal nothing now is left but the single word “Strasbourg.” I felt it when I saw words merely scribbled with a pencil on a wall in a poor street in Brindisi; Italia vittoriosa. But I felt it as much or even more in things infinitely more ancient and remote; in those monuments like mountains that still seem to look down upon all modern things. For these things were more than a trophy that 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 had saved them or at least in what formation they had been saved. I knew that these scattered splendours of antiquity would hardly have 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 turquoise and lapis lazuli, and relieved with marble mountains as clear and famous as marble statues, it was easy to feel all that had been pure and radiant even in the long evening of paganism; but that did not make me forget what strong stars had comforted the inevitable night. The historical moral was the same whether these marble outlines were merely “the isles” seen afar off like sunset 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 was the only thing that would have permanently preserved either. It was but part of the same story when we passed the hoary hills that held the primeval culture of Crete, and remembered that it may well have been the first home of the Philistines. It mattered the less by now whether the pagans were best represented by Poseidon the deity or by Dagon the demon. It mattered the less what gods had blessed the Greeks in their youth and liberty; for I knew what god had blessed them in their despair. I knew by what sign they had survived the long slavery under Ottoman 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 it had ever survived in any sense. Nor did this feeling of our fixed formation 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 men had heard from the lips of Hypatia the last words of Plato. I know the Christians tore Hypatia in pieces; but they did not tear Plato in pieces. The wild men that rode behind Omar the Arab would have thought nothing of tearing every page of Plato in pieces. For it is the nature of all this outer nomadic anarchy that it is capable 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 long history are never lost. As I went forward the vision of our own civilisation, in the form in which it finally found unity, grew clearer and clearer; nor did I ever know it more certainly than when I had left it behind.
For the vision was that of a shape appearing and reappearing among shapeless things; and it was a shape I knew. The imagination was forced to rise into altitudes infinitely ancient and dizzy with distance, as if into the cold colours of primeval dawns, or into the upper strata and dead spaces of a daylight older than the sun and moon. But the character of that central clearance still became clearer and clearer. And my memory turned again homewards; and I thought it was like the vision of a man flying from Northolt, over that little market-place beside my own door; who can see nothing below him but a waste as of grey forests, and the pale pattern of a cross.
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Ho preso soltanto questo unico testo o cartello, fra cento di simili, la questione del lavoro e della libertà; e ho ritenuto valesse la pena di seguirne le tracce da un chiassoso e sconcertante manifesto giallo nelle strade di Londra fino ai suoi luoghi eminenti nella storia. Ma è soltanto un esempio del modo in cui mille cose si raggruppavano e trovavano la loro prospettiva a mano a mano che me ne allontanavo sempre più, e mi avvicinavo alle origini centrali della civiltà. Non dico che vidi la soluzione; ma vidi il problema. Nella confusione del giornalismo e nel cicaleccio della politica, esso è troppo un rompicapo perfino per essere un problema. Per esempio, un mio amico descrisse il suo libro, La via di Roma, come un viaggio attraverso tutta l’Europa che la Fede aveva salvato; e io potrei assai bene descrivere il mio proprio viaggio come uno attraverso tutta l’Europa che la Guerra ha salvato. La traccia dei combattimenti veri e propri, naturalmente, era tremendamente evidente ovunque; le piantagioni di pallide croci sembravano spuntare da ogni lato come cose che crescono; e i primi villaggi francesi che attraversai avevano udito in lontananza, giorno e notte, i cannoni della lunga linea di battaglia, come il frangersi di un interminabile mare esteriore di notte sui confini stessi del mondo. Lo sentii più che mai quando passammo accanto alle nobili torri di Amiens, così vicino al segno dell’alta acqua dell’alta marea della barbarie, in quella notte di terrore proprio prima che la marea si volgesse. Poiché la verità che così si faceva più chiara col viaggiare è rettamente rappresentata dalla metafora dell’artiglieria, come il tuono e la risacca di un mare al di là del mondo. Qualunque altra cosa fosse la guerra, essa era come la resistenza di qualcosa di solido come la terra, e talvolta paziente e inerte come la terra, contro qualcosa di instabile come l’acqua, debole come l’acqua; ma anche forte come l’acqua, forte come è l’acqua in una cateratta o in un’inondazione. Era la resistenza della forma all’informe; quella versione o visione di essa pareva chiarirsi sempre più a mano a mano che procedevo. Era la difesa di quello stesso antico recinto in cui si ergevano le colonne spezzate del foro romano e la colonna nella piazza di Parigi, e di tutti gli altri simili recinti fino ai recinti domestici del mio cane e del mio asino. Tutti avevano lo stesso disegno, il tracciare uno spazio quadrato per l’esperimento della libertà; della vecchia libertà civica o della più tarda libertà universale. Sapevo, per riprendere la metafora domestica, che il cane da guardia dell’Occidente si era di nuovo dimostrato troppo forte per i cani selvatici dell’Oriente. Poiché i nemici di simili limiti creativi sono il caos e l’antica Notte, siano essi la barbarie settentrionale che oppose l’orgoglio tribale e la brutale disciplina all’ideale civico di Parigi, o la barbarie orientale che trasse i briganti dalle terre selvagge dell’Asia per assiderli sul trono di Bisanzio. E come nell’altro caso, ciò che vidi era qualcosa di più semplice e più grande di tutti i dettagli controversi intorno alla guerra e alla pace. Un uomo può ritenere straordinario, come lo ritengo io, che la naturale dissoluzione dell’artificiale Impero germanico in stati più piccoli sia stata in realtà impedita dai suoi nemici, quando essa era già accettata nella disperazione dai suoi amici. Poiché ora ci sforziamo con ogni mezzo di tenere insieme il sistema prussiano, dopo aver martellato con ogni mezzo per quattro anni mortali per farlo scoppiare in pezzi. Oppure può pensare esattamente il contrario; non fa alcuna differenza rispetto al fatto più grande che ho in mente. Un uomo può ritenerlo semplicemente a rovescio, come lo ritengo io, che si debbano scacciare i Turchi dalla Turchia, ma lasciarli a Costantinopoli. Poiché ciò significa cacciare i barbari dai loro stessi rozzi campi e pascoli, e cedere loro la nostra propria città europea e cristiana; è come se i Romani annettessero la Partia ma consegnassero Roma. Ma egli può pensare esattamente il contrario; e la verità più grande e più semplice sarà pur sempre lì. Era che le erbacce e le cose selvagge avevano dappertutto fatto irruzione entro i nostri confini, scavalcando il muro settentrionale o strisciando attraverso la porta orientale, sicché la città sarebbe stata presto inghiottita dalla giungla. E che le linee fossero state ridisegnate con logica o con trascuratezza, o cose particolari sgombrate con coerenza o con capriccio, una linea è stata tracciata da qualche parte e uno sgombero è stato fatto in qualche modo. L’antico piano della nostra città è stato salvato; una città almeno capace di contenere cittadini. Sentii questo nelle casuali reliquie della guerra stessa; lo sentii venti volte di più in quelle reliquie più antiche che perfino la guerra non aveva mai sfiorato affatto; sentii il mutamento tanto nell’immutabile Oriente quanto nel sempre mutevole Occidente. Lo sentii quando attraversai un’altra grande piazza a Parigi per guardare una certa statua, che avevo veduto l’ultima volta drappeggiata di crespo e di quelle ghirlande che diamo ai morti; ma sul cui nudo piedistallo nulla ora rimane se non la sola parola «Strasburgo». Lo sentii quando vidi parole semplicemente scarabocchiate con una matita su un muro in una povera strada di Brindisi; Italia vittoriosa. Ma lo sentii tanto o anche di più in cose infinitamente più antiche e remote; in quei monumenti simili a montagne che ancora paiono guardare dall’alto tutte le cose moderne. Poiché queste cose erano più di un trofeo che era stato eretto, erano un palladio che era stato tratto in salvo. Queste erano le cose che erano state ancora una volta salvate dal caos, come furono salvate a Salamina e a Lepanto; e sapevo che cosa le avesse salvate o almeno in quale formazione fossero state salvate. Sapevo che questi sparsi splendori dell’antichità difficilmente sarebbero giunti fino a noi, per essere messi in pericolo o riscattati, se tutto quel mondo pagano non si fosse cristallizzato nella Cristianità.
Attraversando mari lisci come pavimenti intarsiati di turchese e di lapislazzuli, e ravvivati da montagne di marmo chiare e famose come statue di marmo, era facile sentire tutto ciò che era stato puro e radioso perfino nella lunga sera del paganesimo; ma ciò non mi faceva dimenticare quali forti stelle avessero consolato l’inevitabile notte. La morale storica era la medesima sia che questi contorni marmorei fossero soltanto «le isole» vedute da lontano come nubi al tramonto dai profeti ebrei, sia che fossero sentiti davvero come l’Ellade, il grande arcipelago delle arti e delle armi lodato dai poeti greci; l’eredità storica d’entrambi discese soltanto ai Padri greci. In quei tempi e luoghi selvaggi, la cosa che preservò entrambi era l’unica cosa che avrebbe preservato in modo permanente l’uno o l’altro. Era soltanto parte della stessa storia quando passammo accanto ai canuti colli che custodivano la primordiale cultura di Creta, e ci ricordammo che essa può bene essere stata la prima dimora dei Filistei. Importava tanto meno ormai se i pagani fossero meglio rappresentati da Poseidone il dio o da Dagon il demone. Importava tanto meno quali dèi avessero benedetto i Greci nella loro giovinezza e libertà; poiché sapevo quale dio li avesse benedetti nella loro disperazione. Sapevo con quale segno fossero sopravvissuti alla lunga schiavitù sotto l’orientalismo ottomano; e quale nome avessero invocato nelle tenebre, quando non v’era altra luce che la Luna cornuta di Mahound. Se la gloria della Grecia è sopravvissuta in qualche senso, sapevo perché mai fosse sopravvissuta in un senso qualsiasi. Né questo senso della nostra fissa formazione mi venne meno quando giunsi alle porte stesse dell’Asia e dell’Africa; quando si levò dagli stessi mari azzurri il grande porto di Alessandria; dove aveva brillato il Faro come la stella dell’Ellade, e dove gli uomini avevano udito dalle labbra di Ipazia le ultime parole di Platone. So che i Cristiani fecero a pezzi Ipazia; ma non fecero a pezzi Platone. Gli uomini selvaggi che cavalcavano al seguito di Omar l’Arabo non si sarebbero fatti scrupolo di fare a pezzi ogni pagina di Platone. Poiché è nella natura di tutta questa esteriore anarchia nomade l’essere capace prima o poi di fare a pezzi qualunque e ogni cosa; essa non ha alcun istinto di conservazione né dei bisogni permanenti degli uomini. Dove è passata, le rovine rimangono rovine e non vengono rinnovate; dove le si è resistito ed è stata respinta, gli anelli della nostra lunga storia non vanno mai perduti. Mentre andavo avanti, la visione della nostra stessa civiltà, nella forma in cui essa infine trovò l’unità, si faceva sempre più chiara; né mai la conobbi con maggior certezza di quando me la fui lasciata alle spalle.
Poiché la visione era quella di una forma che appariva e riappariva fra cose informi; ed era una forma che conoscevo. L’immaginazione era costretta a salire in altitudini infinitamente antiche e vertiginose per la distanza, come nei freddi colori delle albe primordiali, o negli strati superiori e negli spazi morti di una luce diurna più antica del sole e della Luna. Ma il carattere di quello sgombero centrale diveniva pur sempre più chiaro e più chiaro. E la mia memoria si volse di nuovo verso casa; e pensai che fosse come la visione di un uomo in volo da Northolt, sopra quella piccola piazza del mercato accanto alla mia stessa porta; il quale non può vedere nulla sotto di sé se non una distesa desolata come di grigie foreste, e il pallido disegno di una croce.
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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 an English governing class. Anyhow it is true that the civilisations are stratified in this formation, or superimposed in this order. It is the first impression produced by the darkness and density of the bazaars, the line of the lighted cafes and the blaze of the big hotels. But it contains a much deeper truth in all three cases, and especially in the case of the French influence. It is indeed one of the first examples of what I mean by the divisions of 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 a place like India. In so far as this is true, it is quite equally true that 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 that it 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 French things are not accepted as French. They are accepted as human. However many foreigners played football, they would still consider football an English thing. But they do not consider fencing a 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 rather advanced Anglomania. But when an Englishman calls it an hotel, we feel no special dread of him either as a dangerous foreigner or a dangerous lunatic. We need not recognise less readily the 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 adventure that the adventurer does remain different from the strange tribes or 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 merely appreciate it properly in its place, there can be no doubt about the cause of that capacity. The cause is in the spirit that 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 success of the French Revolution. They have assumed that it claims to be a sort of divine and distant thing, and therefore have not noticed it in the nearest and most materialistic things. They have watched its wavering in the senate and never seen it walking in the streets; though it can be seen in the streets of Cairo as 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 people who 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 they have the detachment of a governing group and even a garrison. They cannot be mistaken for human beings. The people going to a cafe are simply human beings going to it because it is a human place. They have forgotten how much is French and how much Egyptian in their civilisation; they simply think of it as civilisation. Now this character of the older French culture must be grasped because it 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 back to the Roman culture. In this respect the Gauls really continue the work of the Romans, in making something official which comes at last to be regarded as ordinary. And the great fundamental fact which is incessantly forgotten and ought to be incessantly remembered, about these cities and provinces of the near East, is that they were 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 remember the road or to forget it. I am so constituted as to be capable of 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 side along the ways of the world, he being full of a rich and humane sentiment, because he remembers passing that way a few hundred times since his childhood; while to me existence is a perpetual fairy-tale, because I have forgotten all about it. The lamp-post which moves him 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 me as arresting and revolutionary as a barricade. Now in this, I am glad to say, my temperament is very English; and the difference is very typical of the two functions of the English and the French. But in practical politics the French have a certain advantage in knowing where 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 something of a paradox. The real English claim is never heard in England and never uttered by Englishmen. We do indeed hear a number of false English claims, and other English claims that are rather irrelevant than false. We hear pompous and hypocritical suggestions, full of that which so often accompanies the sin of pride, the weakness of provinciality. We hear suggestions that the English alone can establish anywhere a reign of law, justice, mercy, purity and all the rest of it. We also hear franker and fairer suggestions that the English have after all (as indeed they have) embarked on a spirited and stirring adventure; and that there has been a real romance in the extending of the British Empire in strange lands. But the real case for these semi-eastern occupations is not that 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 search for something non-European. It would be much truer to call it putting Europe together again after it had been broken. It may almost be said of the Britons, considered as the most western of Europeans, that they have so completely forgotten their own history that they have forgotten even their own rights. At any rate they have forgotten the claims that could reasonably be made for them, but which they never think of making for themselves. They have not the faintest notion, for instance, of why hundreds of years ago an English saint was taken from Egypt, or why an English king was fighting in Palestine. They merely have a vague idea that George of Cappadocia was naturalised much in the same way as George of Hanover. They almost certainly suppose that Coeur de Lion in his wanderings happened to meet the King of Egypt, as Captain Cook might happen to meet the King of the Cannibal Islands. To understand the past connection of England with the near East, it is necessary to understand something 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 nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilisation in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; as will be apparent later, I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded. An Arabian gentleman found riding on the road to Paris or hammering on the gates of Vienna can hardly complain that we have sought him out in his simple tent in the desert. The conqueror of Sicily and Spain cannot reasonably express surprise at being 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 Saladin but of the spoils of ancient Egyptian architecture; and that fact is 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 set high like a sign in heaven. The sign is also significant because from this superb height the traveller first beholds the desert, out of which the great conquest came.
CAPITOLO II
LA VIA DEL DESERTO
Si può dire con verità, almeno per quanto riguarda il tipo di cultura, che l’Egitto ha una classe inferiore egiziana, una classe media francese e una classe dirigente inglese. In ogni caso è vero che le civiltà sono stratificate in questa formazione, o sovrapposte in questo ordine. È la prima impressione prodotta dall’oscurità e dalla densità dei bazar, dalla fila dei caffè illuminati e dal bagliore dei grandi alberghi. Ma essa contiene una verità molto più profonda in tutti e tre i casi, e specialmente nel caso dell’influenza francese. È in effetti uno dei primi esempi di ciò che intendo quando dico che le divisioni dell’Occidente si fanno più chiare negli antichi centri dell’Oriente. Si dice spesso che possiamo apprezzare l’opera dell’Inghilterra solo in un luogo come l’India. Nella misura in cui ciò è vero, è del tutto ugualmente vero che possiamo apprezzare l’opera della Francia solo in un luogo come l’Egitto. Ma quest’opera è di natura peculiare e persino paradossale. È troppo pratica per essere appariscente, e così universale da passare inosservata.
La concezione francese dei Diritti dell’Uomo è detta visionaria; ma nella pratica è molto solida e persino prosaica. I francesi hanno un trucco unico e riuscito per cui le cose francesi non sono accettate come francesi. Sono accettate come umane. Per quanti stranieri giocassero a football, considererebbero pur sempre il football una cosa inglese. Ma non considerano la scherma una cosa francese, benché tutti i suoi termini siano ancora francesi. Se un francese etichettasse la sua osteria come una inn o una public house (probabilmente scritto publicouse) lo riterremmo vittima di un’anglomania piuttosto avanzata. Ma quando un inglese la chiama hotel, non proviamo alcun particolare timore di lui, né come pericoloso straniero né come pericoloso pazzo. Non dobbiamo riconoscere meno prontamente il valore di ciò perché la nostra distinzione è diversa; tanto più che la nostra distinzione si va facendo più distinta. Lo spirito degli inglesi è l’avventura; ed è l’essenza dell’avventura che l’avventuriero rimanga diverso dalle strane tribù o dalle strane città che studia proprio a causa della loro stranezza. Egli non diventa simile a loro, come fecero alcuni dei tedeschi, né li persuade a diventare simili a lui, come fanno la maggior parte dei francesi. Ma sia che ci piaccia o meno questa capacità francese, o che semplicemente la apprezziamo giustamente al suo posto, non può esserci alcun dubbio sulla causa di tale capacità. La causa sta nello spirito che così spesso è considerato follemente utopistico e irreale. La causa sta nel credo astratto dell’uguaglianza e della cittadinanza; nel possesso di una filosofia politica che fa appello a tutti gli uomini. In verità gli uomini non hanno mai guardato abbastanza in basso per il successo della Rivoluzione francese. Hanno dato per scontato che essa pretenda di essere una sorta di cosa divina e remota, e perciò non l’hanno notata nelle cose più vicine e più materialistiche. Ne hanno osservato l’oscillare nel senato e non l’hanno mai vista camminare per le strade; benché possa essere vista nelle strade del Cairo come nelle strade di Parigi.
Al Cairo un uomo pensa che sia inglese andare in una sala da tè; ma non pensa che sia francese andare in un caffè. E le persone che vanno alla sala da tè, gli ufficiali e i funzionari inglesi, sono marchiate come inglesi e anche marchiate come ufficiali. Sono generalmente cordiali, generalmente generose, ma hanno il distacco di un gruppo dirigente e persino di una guarnigione. Non possono essere scambiate per esseri umani. Le persone che vanno a un caffè sono semplicemente esseri umani che vi vanno perché è un luogo umano. Hanno dimenticato quanto vi sia di francese e quanto di egiziano nella loro civiltà; la pensano semplicemente come civiltà. Ora, questo carattere della più antica cultura francese va colto, perché è la chiave di molte cose nel mistero dell’Oriente moderno. La chiamo una vecchia cultura perché di fatto risale alla cultura romana. Sotto questo aspetto i Galli continuano davvero l’opera dei Romani, nel fare qualcosa di ufficiale che finisce infine per essere considerato ordinario. E il grande fatto fondamentale che incessantemente si dimentica e che dovrebbe essere incessantemente ricordato, riguardo a queste città e province del vicino Oriente, è che esse furono un tempo romane quanto la Gallia.
C’è un dibattito frivolo e capriccioso che ho spesso avuto con un amico, sul se sia meglio trovare la propria strada o perderla, ricordare la via o dimenticarla. Sono fatto in modo tale da essere capace di perdere la strada nel mio stesso villaggio e quasi nella mia stessa casa. E sono pronto a sostenere che tale privilegio sia poetico. In verità sono pronto a sostenere che entrambi gli atteggiamenti sono preziosi, e dovrebbero esistere fianco a fianco. E così io e il mio amico camminiamo fianco a fianco lungo le vie del mondo, egli colmo di un ricco e umano sentimento, perché ricorda di essere passato per quella via qualche centinaio di volte fin dalla sua fanciullezza; mentre per me l’esistenza è una perpetua fiaba, perché ho dimenticato tutto di essa. Il lampione che a lui strappa una lacrima di reminiscenza a me strappa un grido di stupore; e il muro che per lui è storico come una piramide per me è arrestante e rivoluzionario come una barricata. Ora in questo, sono lieto di dirlo, il mio temperamento è molto inglese; e la differenza è molto tipica delle due funzioni degli inglesi e dei francesi. Ma nella politica pratica i francesi hanno un certo vantaggio nel sapere dove si trovano, e nel sapere che è dove sono già stati. È nell’Impero Romano.
La posizione degli inglesi in Egitto o persino in Palestina è qualcosa di un paradosso. La vera rivendicazione inglese non si sente mai in Inghilterra e non è mai pronunciata dagli inglesi. Udiamo in effetti un certo numero di false rivendicazioni inglesi, e altre rivendicazioni inglesi che sono irrilevanti più che false. Udiamo suggestioni pompose e ipocrite, colme di ciò che così spesso accompagna il peccato dell’orgoglio, la debolezza della provincialità. Udiamo suggestioni che gli inglesi soli possano instaurare ovunque un regno di legge, giustizia, misericordia, purezza e tutto il resto. Udiamo anche suggestioni più franche e più giuste, che gli inglesi dopo tutto (come in effetti hanno fatto) si siano imbarcati in un’avventura animosa ed eccitante; e che ci sia stato un vero romanzo nell’estendere l’Impero Britannico in terre straniere. Ma il vero argomento a favore di queste occupazioni semi-orientali non è quello di estendere l’Impero Britannico in terre straniere. È piuttosto quello di restaurare l’Impero Romano in terre familiari. Non è semplicemente uscire dall’Europa in cerca di qualcosa di non europeo. Sarebbe molto più esatto chiamarlo un rimettere insieme l’Europa dopo che era stata spezzata. Si potrebbe quasi dire dei Britanni, considerati come i più occidentali degli europei, che hanno così completamente dimenticato la propria storia da aver dimenticato persino i propri diritti. In ogni caso hanno dimenticato le rivendicazioni che potrebbero ragionevolmente essere avanzate per loro, ma che essi non pensano mai di avanzare per sé. Non hanno la più pallida idea, per esempio, del perché centinaia di anni fa un santo inglese fu tratto dall’Egitto, o del perché un re inglese combattesse in Palestina. Hanno soltanto una vaga idea che Giorgio di Cappadocia sia stato naturalizzato più o meno allo stesso modo di Giorgio di Hannover. Suppongono quasi certamente che Cuor di Leone nei suoi vagabondaggi abbia incontrato per caso il re d’Egitto, come il capitano Cook potrebbe incontrare per caso il re delle Isole dei Cannibali. Per comprendere l’antica connessione dell’Inghilterra con il vicino Oriente, è necessario comprendere qualcosa che sta dietro l’Europa e persino dietro l’Impero Romano; qualcosa che può essere espresso solo dal nome del Mediterraneo. Quando la gente parla, per esempio, come se le Crociate non fossero state nient’altro che un’incursione aggressiva contro l’Islam, sembra dimenticare nel modo più strano che l’Islam stesso non fu che un’incursione aggressiva contro l’antica e ordinata civiltà di queste parti. Non lo dico per mera ostilità verso la religione di Maometto; come apparirà più avanti, sono pienamente consapevole di molti suoi valori e virtù; ma certamente fu l’Islam a essere l’invasione e la Cristianità a essere la cosa invasa. Un gentiluomo arabo trovato a cavalcare sulla via di Parigi o a battere alle porte di Vienna può difficilmente lamentarsi che siamo andati a cercarlo nella sua semplice tenda nel deserto. Il conquistatore della Sicilia e della Spagna non può ragionevolmente esprimere sorpresa nell’essere oggetto di morbosa curiosità per il popolo d’Italia e di Francia. Nella città del Cairo lo straniero avverte molti dei meriti musulmani, ma avverte certamente il carattere militaristico delle glorie musulmane. La corona della città è la cittadella, costruita dal grande Saladino ma con le spoglie dell’antica architettura egizia; e questo fatto è a sua volta molto simbolico. L’uomo fu un grande conquistatore, ma si comportò certamente come un invasore; spogliò gli egiziani. Distrusse gli antichi templi e sepolcri e costruì i propri con i frammenti. Né questo è l’unico aspetto per cui la cittadella del Cairo è posta in alto come un segno nel cielo. Il segno è significativo anche perché da questa superba altezza il viaggiatore scorge per la prima volta il deserto, da cui venne la grande conquista.
Every one has heard the great story of the Greeks who cried aloud in triumph when they saw the sea afar off; but it is a stranger experience to see the earth afar off. And few of us, strictly speaking, have ever seen the earth at all. In cultivated countries it is always clad, as it were, in green garments. The first sight of the desert is like the sight of a naked giant in the distance. The image is all the more natural because of the particular formation which 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 seen the 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 line of wrinkled and hollow hills like the scalps of bald men; or worse, of bald women. For it is impossible not to think of such repulsive images, in spite of real sublimity of the call to the imagination. There is something curiously hostile and inhuman about the first appearance of the motionless surges of that dry and dreadful sea. Afterwards, if the traveller has happened to linger here and there in the outposts of the desert, has seen the British camp at Kantara or the graceful French garden town of Ismalia, he comes to take the desert as a background, and sometimes a beautiful background; a mirror of mighty reflections and changing colours almost as strange as 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 make itself into something like a mountain range; and the traveller remembers all the tragedies of the desert, when he lifts up his eyes to 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 relation to men than with what the desert is in itself. When the mind has grown used to its monotony, a curious change takes place which I have 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 ordinary word such as “moon” or “man” about fifty times, he will find that 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. Something of 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 this simplification appears, I think, in the religions of the desert, especially in the religion of Islam. It explains something of the super-human hopes that fill the desert prophets concerning the future; it explains something also about their barbarous indifference to the past.
We think of the desert and its stones as old; but in one sense they are unnaturally new. They are unused, and perhaps unusable. They might be the raw material of a world; only they are so raw as to be rejected. It is not easy to define this quality of something primitive, something not mature enough to be fruitful. Indeed there is a hard simplicity about many Eastern things that is as much crude as archaic. A palm-tree is very like a tree drawn by a child—or by a very futurist artist. Even a pyramid is like a 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 which these 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 sense of novelty, that we can begin to understand both the immensity and 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 it merely 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 simple ideas as if they were entirely new ideas. There is a love of concentration which comes from the lack of comparison. The lonely man looking at the lonely palm-tree does see the elementary truths about 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 drawn by a child, but he is not the child who could draw it. He has not command 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 presence he 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 comes from comparison. The man looking at the palm-tree does realise the simple fact that God made it; while the man looking at the lamp-post in a large modern city can be persuaded by a hundred sophistical circumlocutions that he made it himself. But the man in the desert cannot compare the palm-tree with the lamp-post, or even with all the other trees which may be better worth looking at than the lamp-post. Hence his religion, though true as far as it goes, has not the variety and vitality of the churches that were designed by men walking in the woods and orchards. I speak here of the Moslem type of religion and not of the oriental type of 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 is to a forest full of birds. In short, the man of the desert tends to 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 believes in the existence of God believes in the equality of man. And it has been 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 was like a desert rather than a field. Its very humanity was inhuman.
Tutti hanno udito la grande storia dei Greci che gridarono a gran voce in trionfo quando videro il mare in lontananza; ma è un’esperienza più singolare vedere la terra in lontananza. E ben pochi di noi, a rigor di termini, hanno mai veduto affatto la terra. Nei paesi coltivati essa è sempre rivestita, per così dire, di verdi vesti. La prima visione del deserto è come la visione di un gigante nudo in lontananza. L’immagine è tanto più naturale a causa della particolare conformazione che esso assume, almeno là dove confina con i campi dell’Egitto, e come lo si vede dalle alture del Cairo. Coloro che hanno veduto il deserto solo nelle immagini generalmente lo pensano interamente piatto. Ma questo suo margine almeno si erge sull’orizzonte, come una linea di colline rugose e incavate simili ai crani di uomini calvi; o peggio, di donne calve. Poiché è impossibile non pensare a simili immagini ripugnanti, nonostante la reale sublimità del richiamo all’immaginazione. Vi è qualcosa di curiosamente ostile e disumano nella prima apparizione delle immobili onde di quel mare arido e terribile. In seguito, se il viaggiatore ha avuto occasione di indugiare qua e là negli avamposti del deserto, se ha veduto l’accampamento britannico di Kantara o l’aggraziata cittadina-giardino francese di Ismailia, giunge a prendere il deserto come uno sfondo, e talvolta un bello sfondo; uno specchio di possenti riflessi e di colori cangianti quasi altrettanto strani quanto i colori del mare. Ma quando lo si vede per la prima volta addossarsi, e per così dire avanzare, sui campi e sui giardini dell’umanità, allora esso appare davvero come un nemico, o una lunga schiera di nemici; come una fila di fulve belve selvagge così arrestate col capo levato. È la sensazione che una sabbia tanto vana e sterile possa pur nondimeno farsi in qualcosa di simile a una catena di montagne; e il viaggiatore ricorda tutte le tragedie del deserto, quando leva gli occhi verso quelle colline maledette, donde non può venire alcun soccorso.
Ma questo è soltanto un primo scorcio da una città posta in mezzo a verdi campi; e riguarda piuttosto ciò che il deserto è stato nella sua relazione con gli uomini che non ciò che il deserto è in se stesso. Quando la mente si è abituata alla sua monotonia, avviene un curioso mutamento che non ho mai visto notato o spiegato dagli studiosi della scienza mentale. Può suonare strano dire che la monotonia della sua natura diventa novità. Ma se qualcuno vorrà tentare il comune esperimento di pronunciare una parola ordinaria come «luna» o «uomo» una cinquantina di volte, troverà che l’espressione è divenuta straordinaria per pura ripetizione. Un uomo è divenuto uno strano animale con un nome bizzarro come quello dello gnu; e la luna qualcosa di mostruoso come il vitello-lunatico. Qualcosa di questa magia della monotonia è operato dalla monotonia dei deserti; e il viaggiatore si sente come se fosse entrato in un segreto, e guardasse ogni cosa da un altro lato. Qualcosa di questa semplificazione appare, io credo, nelle religioni del deserto, specialmente nella religione dell’Islam. Essa spiega qualcosa delle speranze sovrumane che colmano i profeti del deserto intorno al futuro; spiega anche qualcosa della loro barbara indifferenza verso il passato.
Noi pensiamo al deserto e alle sue pietre come antichi; ma in un certo senso essi sono innaturalmente nuovi. Sono inusati, e forse inusabili. Potrebbero essere la materia prima di un mondo; solo che sono tanto grezzi da essere respinti. Non è facile definire questa qualità di qualcosa di primitivo, di qualcosa non abbastanza maturo per essere fecondo. Vi è invero una dura semplicità in molte cose orientali che è tanto rozza quanto arcaica. Una palma è molto simile a un albero disegnato da un bambino—o da un artista assai futurista. Persino una piramide è simile a una figura matematica tracciata da un maestro di scuola che insegna ai fanciulli; e la sua stessa imponenza è quella di un’ultima astrazione platonica. Vi è qualcosa di curiosamente semplice nella forma in cui questi colossali cristalli delle antiche sabbie sono stati gettati. È soltanto quando abbiamo sentito qualcosa di questo elemento, non solo di semplicità, ma di rozzezza, e persino in un certo senso di novità, che possiamo cominciare a comprendere tanto l’immensità quanto l’insufficienza di quella potenza che venne fuori dal deserto, la grande religione di Maometto.
Nel rosso cerchio del deserto, nel luogo oscuro e segreto, il profeta scopre le cose ovvie. Non lo dico soltanto come uno scherno, poiché le cose ovvie sono assai facilmente dimenticate; e in verità ogni alta civiltà decade dimenticando le cose ovvie. Ma è vero che in una tale solitudine gli uomini tendono a prendere idee assai semplici come se fossero idee interamente nuove. Vi è un amore della concentrazione che nasce dalla mancanza di paragone. L’uomo solitario che guarda la palma solitaria vede davvero le verità elementari intorno alla palma; e le verità elementari sono assai essenziali. Così egli vede che, per quanto la palma possa essere un disegno assai semplice, non fu lui a disegnarla. Essa può sembrare un albero disegnato da un bambino, ma egli non è il bambino che potrebbe disegnarla. Egli non ha il dominio di quella lavagna magica su cui le immagini possono prendere vita, né di quel gesso verde magico di cui le linee verdi possono crescere. Egli vede all’istante che una potenza è all’opera, alla cui presenza egli e la palma sono ugualmente piccoli fanciulli. In altre parole, egli è abbastanza intelligente per credere in Dio; e il musulmano, l’uomo del deserto, è abbastanza intelligente per credere in Dio. Ma la sua fede manca di quella umana complessità che nasce dal paragone. L’uomo che guarda la palma coglie bene il semplice fatto che Dio la fece; mentre l’uomo che guarda il lampione in una grande città moderna può essere persuaso da cento sofistiche circonlocuzioni che sia stato lui a farlo da sé. Ma l’uomo nel deserto non può paragonare la palma con il lampione, né persino con tutti gli altri alberi che potrebbero valere ben più la pena d’essere guardati che non il lampione. Quindi la sua religione, per quanto vera fin dove giunge, non ha la varietà e la vitalità delle chiese che furono progettate da uomini che camminavano nei boschi e nei frutteti. Parlo qui del tipo musulmano di religione e non del tipo orientale di ornamento, che è molto più antico del tipo musulmano di religione. Ma persino il tipo orientale di ornamento, per quanto sovente ammirevole, sta all’ornamento di una cattedrale gotica come una foresta fossile sta a una foresta piena di uccelli. In breve, l’uomo del deserto tende a semplificare troppo, e a prendere la sua prima verità per l’ultima verità. E come è con la religione così è con la moralità. Colui che crede nell’esistenza di Dio crede nell’eguaglianza dell’uomo. E fu uno dei meriti della Fede musulmana che essa sentì gli uomini come uomini, e non fu incapace di accogliere uomini di molte razze diverse. Ma anche qui era così dura e rozza che la sua stessa eguaglianza era simile a un deserto piuttosto che a un campo. La sua stessa umanità era disumana.
But though this human sentiment is rather rudimentary it is very real. When a man in the desert meets another man, he is really a man; the proverbial two-legged fowl without feathers. He is an absolute and elementary shape, like the palm-tree or the pyramid. The discoverer does not pause to consider through what gradations he may have been evolved from a camel. When the man is a mere dot in the distance, the other man does not shout at him and ask whether he had a university education, or whether he is quite sure he is purely Teutonic and not Celtic or 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 against a 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 dangerous potentiality of fanaticism of the menace of which something may be said 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 does take his faith as a fact, and not even as a truth in our more transcendental sense. When he does take up a mystical idea he takes it 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 divides the man from the camel. But even then he recognises the equality of men in 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 over the Jew, who is generally so much his intellectual superior; and even in some ways his spiritual superior. The Jew has far more moral 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 something more worthy of the genius of Isaiah and Spinoza. The Moslem Paradise is 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 race that 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 Englishmen and 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 himself unworthy 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 producing a much subtler kind of arrogance in the Jews. From this particular sort of self-deception the more savage man of the desert is free. If he is not considering somebody as a Moslem, he will consider him as a man. At the price of something like barbarism, he has at 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 in the sentiment of sex. Islam asserts admirably the equality of men; but it is the equality of males. No one can deny that a noble dignity is possible even to the poorest, who has seen the Arabs coming in from the desert to the cities of Palestine or Egypt. No one can deny that men whose rags are dropping off their backs can bear themselves in a way befitting kings or prophets in the great stories of Scripture. No one can be surprised that so many fine artists have delighted to draw such models on the spot, and to make realistic studies for illustrations to the Old and New Testaments. On the road to Cairo one may see twenty groups exactly like that of 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 ago that petticoats, which some regard as a garb of humiliation for women are 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 his own family, is the king and the priest and the judge. I do not mean merely that he is the master, as many would say of the male in many Western societies, especially simple and self-governing societies. I mean something more; I mean that he has not only the kingdom and the power but the glory, and even as it were the glamour. I mean he has not only the rough leadership that we often give to the man, but the special sort of social beauty and stateliness that we generally expect only of the woman. What we mean when we say that an ambitious man wants to have a fine woman at the head of the dinner-table, that the Moslem world really means when it expects to see a fine man at the head of the house. Even in the street he 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 exhibits this indefinable character not merely of dignity but of pomp. It can be traced even in the tarbouch, the minimum of Turkish attire worn by all the commercial classes; the thing more commonly called 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-dress of a priest. And it is a hat one cannot take off to a lady.
Ma per quanto questo sentimento umano sia piuttosto rudimentale, esso è quanto mai reale. Quando un uomo nel deserto incontra un altro uomo, costui è davvero un uomo; il proverbiale volatile bipede senza penne. È una forma assoluta ed elementare, come la palma o la piramide. Lo scopritore non si sofferma a considerare attraverso quali gradazioni possa essersi evoluto da un cammello. Quando l’uomo non è che un punto in lontananza, l’altro uomo non gli grida per chiedergli se abbia avuto un’educazione universitaria, o se sia proprio sicuro di essere puramente teutonico e non celtico o iberico. Un uomo è un uomo; e un uomo è cosa oltremodo importante. Una cosa riscatta la moralità musulmana e può essere posta a fronte di una montagna di crimini: un considerevole deposito di buon senso. E il primo fatto del buon senso è il comune vincolo degli uomini. Vi è invero nel carattere musulmano anche una profonda e assai pericolosa potenzialità di fanatismo, della cui minaccia forse si dirà qualcosa più avanti. Il fanatismo suona come il netto contrario del buon senso; eppure, per quanto curioso, sono entrambi due facce della stessa cosa. Il fanatico del deserto è pericoloso proprio perché prende la sua fede come un fatto, e non già come una verità nel nostro senso più trascendentale. Quando davvero accoglie un’idea mistica, la prende come prende l’uomo o la palma; vale a dire, in tutta letteralità. Quando distingue qualcuno non come uomo ma come musulmano, allora divide il musulmano dal non musulmano esattamente come divide l’uomo dal cammello. Ma anche allora riconosce l’uguaglianza degli uomini nel senso dell’uguaglianza dei musulmani. Egli non complica, per esempio, la propria coscienza con alcuna falsa scienza sulle razze. In questo egli ha qualcosa come un vantaggio intellettuale sull’ebreo, che generalmente gli è tanto superiore per intelletto; e persino, per certi versi, superiore per spirito. L’ebreo ha assai maggiore immaginazione morale e simpatia per gli ideali più sottili dell’anima. Per esempio, si dice che molti ebrei non credano in una vita futura; ma se pur credessero in una vita futura, essa sarebbe qualcosa di più degno del genio di Isaia e di Spinoza. Il Paradiso musulmano è un Paradiso assai terreno. Ma con tutte le loro raffinate percezioni, gli ebrei soffrono di una grave sciagura: quella di essere un Popolo Eletto. È il vizio di ogni patriottismo o religione fondati sulla razza che l’individuo stesso divenga la cosa da adorare; l’individuo è il proprio ideale, e persino il proprio idolo. Questa fantasia fu fatale ai tedeschi; è fatale agli anglosassoni, ogni qual volta alcuno di essi rinneghi il glorioso nome di inglesi e americani per cadere in quella squallida definizione. Non è così quando la nazione è sentita come una nobile astrazione, di cui l’individuo va fiero nell’astratto. Un francese è fiero della Francia, e perciò può reputarsi indegno della Francia. Ma un tedesco è fiero di essere un tedesco; e non può essere troppo indegno di essere un tedesco quando è un tedesco. In breve, il mero orgoglio di famiglia lusinga ogni membro della famiglia; esso produsse l’arroganza dei tedeschi, ed è capace di produrre una sorta assai più sottile di arroganza negli ebrei. Da questa particolare specie di autoinganno l’uomo più selvaggio del deserto è libero. Se non considera qualcuno come musulmano, lo considererà come uomo. Al prezzo di qualcosa come la barbarie, egli è stato almeno salvato dall’etnologia.
Ma anche qui l’ovvio è per lui un limite non meno che una luce. Esso non consente, per esempio, nulla di fine o di sottile nel sentimento del sesso. L’Islam afferma mirabilmente l’uguaglianza degli uomini; ma è l’uguaglianza dei maschi. Nessuno può negare che una nobile dignità sia possibile anche al più povero, chi abbia visto gli arabi giungere dal deserto alle città di Palestina o d’Egitto. Nessuno può negare che uomini le cui vesti cadono loro a brandelli dalle spalle sappiano portarsi in un modo degno di re o profeti nelle grandi storie della Scrittura. Nessuno può stupirsi che tanti fini artisti si siano dilettati a ritrarre sul posto simili modelli, e a trarne studi realistici per le illustrazioni dell’Antico e del Nuovo Testamento. Sulla strada per il Cairo si possono vedere venti gruppi esattamente simili a quello della Sacra Famiglia nei dipinti della Fuga in Egitto; con una sola differenza. L’uomo cavalca l’asino.
In Oriente è il maschio a essere dignitoso e persino cerimonioso. Forse è per questo che porta le gonne. Ho fatto notare molto tempo fa che le sottane, che alcuni considerano una veste di umiliazione per le donne, sono in realtà considerate l’unica veste di magnificenza per gli uomini, quando essi desiderano essere qualcosa di più che uomini. Sono indossate dai re, dai sacerdoti e dai giudici. Il maschio musulmano, specialmente nella propria famiglia, è il re e il sacerdote e il giudice. Non intendo semplicemente che egli sia il padrone, come molti direbbero del maschio in molte società occidentali, specialmente nelle società semplici e che si governano da sé. Intendo qualcosa di più; intendo che egli ha non soltanto il regno e la potenza, ma la gloria, e persino, per così dire, l’incanto. Intendo che egli possiede non soltanto la rozza autorità che spesso attribuiamo all’uomo, ma quella speciale sorta di bellezza e maestà sociale che generalmente ci aspettiamo solo dalla donna. Ciò che intendiamo quando diciamo che un uomo ambizioso desidera avere una bella donna a capo della tavola, il mondo musulmano davvero lo intende quando si aspetta di vedere un bell’uomo a capo della casa. Persino nella strada egli è il pavone, colorato assai più splendidamente della femmina del pavone. Persino quando è vestito con un costume comparativamente sobrio e in parte europeo, come fuori dai caffè del Cairo e delle grandi città, egli esibisce questo indefinibile carattere non solo di dignità ma di pompa. Lo si può rintracciare persino nel tarbouch, il minimo dell’abbigliamento turco portato da tutte le classi commerciali; la cosa più comunemente chiamata in Inghilterra fez. Il fez non è una sorta di berretto da fumo. È una torre di scarlatto spesso abbastanza alta da essere il copricapo di un sacerdote. Ed è un cappello che non si può togliere dinanzi a una signora.
This fact is familiar enough in talk about Moslem and oriental life generally; but I only repeat it in order to refer it back to the same simplification which is the advantage and disadvantage of 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 delicate balance between the sexes which gives the rarest and most poetic kind of pleasure to those who can strike it. But it is not self-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 sense that all the fame and fun should go to the sex that is stronger and less tied, as that all the authority should go to the parents rather than the children. Pity for weakness he can understand; and the Moslem is quite capable of giving royal alms to a cripple or 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 of the more civilised sentiment. This hard and literal view of life gives no 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 there is courtesy there is comedy. There is no comedy in the desert.
Another quite logical and consistent element, in the very logical and consistent creed we call Mahometanism, is the element that we call Vandalism. Since such few and obvious things alone are vital, and since a half-artistic half-antiquarian affection is not one of these things, and cannot be called obvious, it is largely left out. It is very difficult to say in a few well-chosen words exactly what is now the use of the Pyramids. Therefore Saladin, the great Saracen warrior, simply stripped the 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 to the 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 of the great pagan literature and art. This is not concerned with brutal outbreaks of revenge which may be found on both sides, or with chivalrous caprices 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 Dante said farewell to Virgil when he left him in the limbo of the pagans. The Moslem traditions, unlike the medieval legends, do not suggest the image of a knight who kissed Venus before he killed her. We see in all the Christian ages this combination which is not a compromise, but rather a complexity made by two contrary enthusiasms; as when the Dark Ages copied out the pagan poems while denying the pagan legends; or when the popes of the Renascence imitated the Greek temples while denying the Greek gods. This high inconsistency is inconsistent with Islam. Islam, as I have said, takes everything literally, and does not know how to play with anything. And the cause of the contrast is the historical cause of which we must be conscious in all studies of this kind. The Christian Church had from a very early date the idea of reconstructing a whole civilisation, and even a complex civilisation. It was the attempt to make a new balance, which differed from the old balance of the stoics of Rome; but which could not afford to lose its balance any more than they. It differed because the old system was one of many religions under one government, while the new was one of many governments under one religion. But the idea of variety in unity remained though it was in a sense reversed. A historical instinct made the men of the new Europe try hard to find a place for everything in the system, however much might be denied to the individual. Christians might lose everything, but Christendom, if possible, must not lose anything. The very nature of Islam, even at its best, was quite different from this. Nobody supposed, even subconsciously, that Mahomet meant to restore ancient Babylon as medievalism vaguely sought to restore ancient Rome. Nobody thought that the builders of the Mosque of Omar had looked at the Pyramids as the builders of St. Peter’s might have looked at the Parthenon. Islam began at the beginning; it was content with the 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 movement arising from a very noble mood, but sooner or later it must find its level 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 somewhere one of his perfectly picked phrases for an empty-minded man; that he has not one thought to rub against another while he waits for 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 one thought 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.
Questo fatto è abbastanza noto quando si parla della vita musulmana e orientale in generale; ma lo ripeto soltanto per ricondurlo a quella stessa semplificazione che è il vantaggio e lo svantaggio della filosofia del deserto. La cavalleria non è un’idea ovvia. Non è chiara come un manico di picca o come una palma. È un delicato equilibrio fra i sessi, che offre il più raro e più poetico dei piaceri a coloro che sanno coglierlo. Ma non è cosa evidente di per sé a un selvaggio per il solo fatto che egli sia anche un uomo sano di mente. Spesso gli sembra tanto parte del suo rozzo buon senso che tutta la gloria e tutto il divertimento debbano spettare al sesso più forte e meno legato, quanto che ogni autorità debba spettare ai genitori piuttosto che ai figli. La pietà per la debolezza egli la può comprendere; e il musulmano è ben capace di elargire elemosine regali a uno storpio o a un orfano. Ma la riverenza per la debolezza per lui è semplicemente priva di senso. È un’idea mistica che per lui non è altro che un mistero. Ma lo stesso vale per quello che si potrebbe chiamare il lato più lieve del sentimento più civilizzato. Questa concezione dura e letterale della vita non lascia posto a quel lieve elemento di una magnanima sorta di recitazione, che percorre tutti i nostri racconti di veri amanti in Occidente. Ovunque vi sia cavalleria vi è cortesia; e ovunque vi sia cortesia vi è commedia. Non c’è commedia nel deserto.
Un altro elemento del tutto logico e coerente, nel credo assai logico e coerente che chiamiamo maomettanismo, è l’elemento che chiamiamo vandalismo. Poiché soltanto poche e ovvie cose sole sono vitali, e poiché un affetto per metà artistico e per metà antiquario non è una di queste cose, né può dirsi ovvio, esso viene in gran parte tralasciato. È assai difficile dire in poche parole ben scelte quale sia oggi l’utilità delle Piramidi. Perciò Saladino, il grande guerriero saraceno, spogliò semplicemente le Piramidi per costruire una fortezza militare sulle alture del Cairo. È un po’ difficile definire con esattezza quale sia il dovere di un uomo verso la Sfinge; e perciò i Mamelucchi la usarono interamente come bersaglio. C’era in loro ben poco di quel duplice sentimento, colmo di pathos e d’ironia, che divideva i cuori dei primi cristiani al cospetto della grande letteratura e arte pagana. Ciò non riguarda i brutali scoppi di vendetta che si possono trovare da entrambe le parti, né i cavallereschi capricci di tolleranza, che pure si possono trovare da entrambe le parti; riguarda la più intima mentalità delle due religioni, che dev’essere compresa per rendere giustizia all’una e all’altra. La mente musulmana non tese mai a quel modo mistico dell’«amare e insieme lasciare» con cui Agostino levò il suo grido dinanzi all’antica bellezza, o Dante disse addio a Virgilio quando lo lasciò nel limbo dei pagani. Le tradizioni musulmane, a differenza delle leggende medievali, non suggeriscono l’immagine di un cavaliere che baciò Venere prima di ucciderla. Vediamo in tutte le età cristiane questa combinazione che non è un compromesso, ma piuttosto una complessità formata da due entusiasmi contrari; come quando i Secoli Bui ricopiavano i poemi pagani pur negando le leggende pagane; o come quando i papi del Rinascimento imitavano i templi greci pur negando gli dèi greci. Questa alta incoerenza è incoerente con l’Islam. L’Islam, come ho detto, prende ogni cosa alla lettera, e non sa giocare con nulla. E la causa del contrasto è la causa storica di cui dobbiamo essere consapevoli in tutti gli studi di questo genere. La Chiesa cristiana ebbe fin da data assai remota l’idea di ricostruire un’intera civiltà, e persino una civiltà complessa. Fu il tentativo di creare un nuovo equilibrio, che differiva dall’antico equilibrio degli stoici di Roma; ma che non poteva permettersi di perdere il proprio equilibrio più di quanto lo potessero essi. Differiva perché l’antico sistema era quello di molte religioni sotto un solo governo, mentre il nuovo era quello di molti governi sotto una sola religione. Ma l’idea della varietà nell’unità rimase, benché in un certo senso rovesciata. Un istinto storico spinse gli uomini della nuova Europa a sforzarsi di trovare un posto per ogni cosa nel sistema, per quanto potesse essere negato all’individuo. I cristiani potevano perdere tutto, ma la cristianità, se possibile, non doveva perdere nulla. La natura stessa dell’Islam, anche al suo meglio, era assai diversa da questa. Nessuno supponeva, neppure inconsciamente, che Maometto intendesse restaurare l’antica Babilonia come il medievalismo cercava vagamente di restaurare l’antica Roma. Nessuno pensava che i costruttori della Moschea di Omar avessero guardato alle Piramidi come i costruttori di San Pietro avrebbero potuto guardare al Partenone. L’Islam cominciò dal principio; si accontentò dell’idea di possedere una grande verità; come in effetti possedeva una colossale verità. Era una verità tanto immensa che era difficile accorgersi che fosse una mezza verità.
L’Islam fu un movimento; ecco perché ha cessato di muoversi. Poiché un movimento non può essere altro che uno stato d’animo. Può essere un movimento assai necessario, nato da uno stato d’animo assai nobile, ma prima o poi deve trovare il proprio livello in una filosofia più ampia, ed essere bilanciato contro altre cose. L’Islam fu una reazione verso la semplicità; fu una violenta semplificazione, che si rivelò una semplificazione eccessiva. Stevenson ha in qualche luogo una delle sue frasi perfettamente scelte per un uomo dalla mente vuota; che egli non ha un solo pensiero da strofinare contro un altro mentre aspetta un treno. Il musulmano aveva un solo pensiero, e dei più vitali; la grandezza di Dio che rende tutti gli uomini pari. Ma il musulmano non aveva un pensiero da strofinare contro un altro, perché in realtà non ne aveva un altro. È dall’attrito di due cose spirituali, della tradizione e dell’invenzione, o della sostanza e del simbolo, che la mente prende fuoco. I credi condannati come complessi hanno qualcosa di simile al segreto del sesso; possono generare pensieri.
An idealistic intellectual remarked recently that there were a great many things in the creed for which he had no use. He might just as well have said that there were a great many things in the Encyclopedia Britannica for which he had no use. It would probably have occurred to him that the work in question was meant for humanity and not for him. But even in the case of the Encyclopedia, it will often be found a stimulating exercise to read two articles on two widely different subjects and note where they touch. In fact there is really a great deal to be said for the man in Pickwick who read first about China and 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 suffer from 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 thus criticising the Moslem movement will do well to criticise himself and his world at the same time. For in truth most modern things are mere movements in the same sense as the Moslem movement. They are at best fashions, in which one thing is exaggerated because 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 only move 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 sexes by their feminism than the Arabs did by their anti-feminism. A woman can find her home on the hustings even less than in the harem; but such movements do not really attempt to find a final home for anybody or anything. Bolshevism is a movement; and in my opinion a very natural and just movement considered as a revolt against the crude cruelty of Capitalism. But when we find the Bolshevists making 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 having to apply that principle, let us say, to “Charley’s Aunt.” None of these things seek to establish a complete philosophy such as Aquinas founded on Aristotle. The only two modern men who 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 enough man to show how difficult it is to do it in modern times. None of these movements can do anything but move; they have not discovered where to rest.
And this fact brings us back to the man of the desert, who moves and does not rest; but who has many superiorities to the restless races of the industrial city. Men who have been in the Manchester movement in 1860 and the Fabian movement in 1880 cannot sneer at a religious mood that lasted for eight hundred years. And those who tolerate the degraded homelessness of the slums cannot despise the much more dignified homelessness of the desert. Nevertheless, the thing is a homelessness and not a home; and there runs 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 Western sense of recognising the kindred points of heaven and home. Even the exception to this rule is an exception at once terrible and touching. There is one house that the Moslem does build like 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 street of houses, each with a door that might be opened by a dead man. But in a less fanciful sense, there is about it something profoundly pathetic and human. Here indeed is the sailor home from sea, in the only port he will consent to call his home; here at last the nomad confesses the common need of men. But even about this there 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 progress and Catholics call development. There is death and hell in the desert when it does begin over again. There is always the 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 thousands of 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 the repetitions of wide sands and rolling skies. The very phrase is like an everlasting echo, that can never cease to say the same sacred word; and when I saw afterwards the mightiest and most magnificent of all the mosques of that land, I found that its inscriptions had the same character of a deliberate and defiant sameness. The ancient Arabic alphabet and script is itself at once so elegant and so exact that it can be used as a fixed ornament, like the egg and dart pattern or the Greek key. It is as if we could make a 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 Creed is full of vain repetitions; but that is because people are too lazy to listen to it, or not lucid enough to understand it. The same terms are used throughout, as they are in a proposition of Euclid. But the steps are all as differentiated and progressive as in a proposition of Euclid. But in the inscriptions of the Mosque whole sentences seem to occur, not like the steps of an argument, but rather like the chorus of a song. This is the impression everywhere produced by 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 those tremendous plains, brooding upon the soul with all the solemn weight of the self-evident.
Un intellettuale idealista ha osservato di recente che vi erano moltissime cose nel credo di cui non sapeva che farsi. Avrebbe potuto altrettanto bene dire che vi erano moltissime cose nell’Encyclopedia Britannica di cui non sapeva che farsi. Gli sarebbe probabilmente venuto in mente che l’opera in questione era destinata all’umanità e non a lui. Ma persino nel caso dell’Encyclopedia si troverà spesso che è un esercizio stimolante leggere due articoli su due argomenti assai diversi e notare dove si toccano. In verità c’è davvero molto da dire a favore dell’uomo del Pickwick che lesse prima della Cina e poi della metafisica e combinò le sue nozioni. Ma comunque stiano le cose nel famoso caso della metafisica cinese, è proprio questo che manca soprattutto nella metafisica araba. Essa soffre, come ho detto della palma nel deserto, per una mancanza di quella vitalità che nasce dalla complessità, e di quella complessità che nasce dal confronto. Essa soffre per essere stata un unico movimento in un’unica direzione; per essere cominciata come uno stato d’animo e finita piuttosto come una maniera, ossia una mera consuetudine o moda. Ma ogni cristiano moderno che così critichi il movimento musulmano farà bene a criticare se stesso e il proprio mondo nel medesimo tempo. Poiché in verità la maggior parte delle cose moderne sono meri movimenti nello stesso senso del movimento musulmano. Sono nel migliore dei casi mode, in cui una cosa viene esagerata perché è stata trascurata. Sono nel peggiore dei casi mere monomanie, in cui tutto viene trascurato affinché una sola cosa possa essere esagerata. Buoni o cattivi, sono ugualmente movimenti che per loro natura possono muoversi soltanto per una certa distanza e poi fermarsi. Il femminismo, per esempio, è per sua natura un movimento, e uno che deve fermarsi da qualche parte. Ma le Suffragette non fondarono una filosofia dei sessi con il loro femminismo più di quanto facessero gli Arabi con il loro antifemminismo. Una donna può trovare la propria casa sui palchi elettorali ancor meno che nell’harem; ma simili movimenti non tentano davvero di trovare una dimora definitiva per chicchessia o alcunché. Il bolscevismo è un movimento; e a mio parere un movimento assai naturale e giusto considerato come rivolta contro la cruda crudeltà del Capitalismo. Ma quando troviamo i bolscevichi che stabiliscono per regola che il dramma «deve incoraggiare lo spirito proletario», è evidente che coloro i quali lo affermano non sono soltanto maniaci ma, ciò che qui più conta, monomaniaci. Si immagini di dover applicare quel principio, poniamo, a «La zia di Charley». Nessuna di queste cose cerca di stabilire una filosofia completa quale Aquino fondò su Aristotele. I soli due uomini moderni che lo tentarono furono Comte e Herbert Spencer. Spencer, credo, era un uomo troppo piccolo per riuscirvi affatto; e Comte era un uomo abbastanza grande da mostrare quanto sia difficile riuscirvi nei tempi moderni. Nessuno di questi movimenti può far altro che muoversi; non hanno scoperto dove riposare.
E questo fatto ci riporta all’uomo del deserto, che si muove e non riposa; ma che ha molte superiorità rispetto alle razze inquiete della città industriale. Uomini che sono stati nel movimento di Manchester nel 1860 e nel movimento fabiano nel 1880 non possono sogghignare di uno stato d’animo religioso durato ottocento anni. E coloro che tollerano la degradata assenza di casa dei bassifondi non possono disprezzare l’assai più dignitosa assenza di casa del deserto. Nondimeno, la cosa è un’assenza di casa e non una casa; e attraverso tutto ciò corre la nota del nomade. Il musulmano prende alla lettera, come prende ogni cosa, la verità che quaggiù non abbiamo una città duratura. Egli non riesce a scorgere alcun senso nel misticismo del materialismo, l’idea sacramentale che un poeta francese espresse così nobilmente, quando disse che la nostra città terrena è il corpo della città di Dio. Non ha vera nozione del costruire una casa, né, nel nostro senso occidentale, del riconoscere i punti affini del cielo e della casa. Persino l’eccezione a questa regola è un’eccezione al tempo stesso terribile e commovente. Vi è una casa che il musulmano costruisce davvero come una casa e persino come una dimora, spesso con mura e tetto e porta; squadrata come un cottage, solida come un forte. Ed è la sua tomba. Un cimitero musulmano è letteralmente come un piccolo villaggio. È un villaggio, come dice il detto, che non si vorrebbe attraversare di notte. C’è qualcosa di singolarmente sinistro in una così strana via di case, ciascuna con una porta che potrebbe essere aperta da un morto. Ma in un senso meno fantasioso, vi è in essa qualcosa di profondamente patetico e umano. Qui davvero è il marinaio tornato a casa dal mare, nell’unico porto che acconsentirà a chiamare la propria casa; qui infine il nomade confessa il comune bisogno degli uomini. Ma perfino su questo incombe la presenza del deserto e delle sue aride ossa della ragione. Egli non accetterà nulla tra una tenda e una tomba.
La filosofia del deserto può soltanto ricominciare da capo. Non può crescere; non può avere ciò che i protestanti chiamano progresso e i cattolici chiamano sviluppo. C’è morte e inferno nel deserto quando esso ricomincia da capo. C’è sempre la possibilità che un nuovo profeta riscopra l’antica verità; che trovi di nuovo scritto sulle rosse sabbie il segreto dell’ovvio. Ma sarà sempre lo stesso segreto, per il quale migliaia di questi uomini semplici e seri e splendidamente valorosi moriranno. Il messaggio più alto di Maometto è un frammento di divina tautologia. Il grido stesso che Dio è Dio è una ripetizione di parole, come le ripetizioni delle ampie sabbie e dei cieli ondeggianti. La frase stessa è come un’eco eterna, che non può mai cessare di dire la medesima sacra parola; e quando in seguito vidi la più possente e magnifica di tutte le moschee di quella terra, trovai che le sue iscrizioni avevano lo stesso carattere di una deliberata e sfidante uniformità. L’antico alfabeto e la scrittura araba sono di per sé al tempo stesso così eleganti e così esatti da poter essere usati come ornamento fisso, come il motivo a ovoli e dardi o la greca. È come se potessimo fare un’araldica della scrittura a mano, o coprire una carta da parati di firme. Ma lo stile letterario è tanto ricorrente quanto lo stile decorativo; forse è per questo che può essere usato come stile decorativo. Le frasi sono ripetute più e più volte come stelle o fiori ornamentali. Molte persone moderne, per esempio, immaginano che il Credo atanasiano sia pieno di vane ripetizioni; ma ciò accade perché la gente è troppo pigra per ascoltarlo, o non abbastanza lucida per comprenderlo. Gli stessi termini vi sono impiegati per intero, come lo sono in una proposizione di Euclide. Ma i passaggi sono tutti differenziati e progressivi come in una proposizione di Euclide. Ma nelle iscrizioni della moschea intere frasi paiono ricorrere, non come i passaggi di un ragionamento, bensì come il ritornello di una canzone. Questa è l’impressione dappertutto prodotta da questo spirito delle distese sabbiose; questa è la voce del deserto, benché il muezzin gridi dalle alte torri della città. In verità si è spinti a ripetersi a proposito della ripetizione, tanto è schiacciante l’impressione degli alti orizzonti di quelle tremende pianure, che incombono sull’anima con tutto il solenne peso dell’auto-evidente.
There is indeed another aspect of the desert, yet more ancient and momentous, of which I may speak; but here I only deal with its effect on this great religion of simplicity. For it is through 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 memory because of the suddenness with which I escaped from it. I had not expected the contrast; and it may have coloured all my after experiences. I descended from the desert train at Ludd, which had all the look of 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 romantic about its appearance. It was perhaps unusually dreary; for heavy rain had fallen; and the water stood about in what it is easier to 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 I was going; and it wound its way up miry paths to a more rolling stretch of country with patches of cactus here and there. And then with a curious abruptness I became conscious that the 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 I had come home; or rather to that home behind home for which we are all homesick. The lost memory of it is the life at once of faith and of fairy-tale. Groves glowing with oranges rose behind hedges of grotesque cactus or prickly pear; which really looked like green dragons guarding the golden apples of the Hesperides. On each side of the road were such flowers as I had never seen before under the sun; for indeed they seemed to have the sun in them rather than the sun on them. Clusters and crowds of crimson anemones were of a red not to be symbolised in blood or wine; but rather in the red glass that glows in the window dedicated to a martyr. Only in a wild Eastern tale could one picture a pilgrim or traveller finding such a garden in the desert; and I thought of the oldest tale of all and the garden from which we came. But there was something in it yet more subtle; which there must be in the impression of any earthly paradise. It is vital to such a 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 darting hither and thither among the flowers; and I had the fancy that they were the souls of the town-sparrows of London and the smoky cities, and now gone wherever the good sparrows go. And a little way up the road before me, on the hill between the cactus hedges, I saw a grey donkey trotting; and I could almost have sworn that it was the donkey I had left at home.
He was trotting on ahead of me, and the outline of his erect and elfish ears was dark against the sky. He was evidently going somewhere with great determination; and I thought I knew to what appropriate place he was going, and that it was my fate to follow him like a moving omen. I lost sight of him later, for I had to complete the journey by train; but the train followed the same direction, which was up steeper and steeper hills. I began to realise more clearly where I was; and to know that the garden in the desert that had bloomed so suddenly about me had borne for many desert wanderers the name of the promised land. As the rocks rose higher and higher on every side, and hung over us like terrible and tangible clouds, I saw in the dim grass of the slopes below them something I had never seen before. It was a rainbow fallen upon the earth, with no part of it against the sky, but only the grasses and the flowers shining through its fine shades of fiery colour. I thought this also was like an omen; and in such a mood of idle mysticism there fell on 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 other vehicle for the last lap of the journey, a very courteous officer, an army surgeon, gave me a seat in an ambulance wagon; and it was under the shield of the red cross that I entered Jerusalem.
For suddenly, between a post of the wagon and a wrack of rainy cloud I saw it, uplifted and withdrawn under all the arching heavens of its history, alone with its benediction and its blasphemy, the city that is set upon a hill, and cannot be hid.
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Vi è invero un altro aspetto del deserto, ancora più antico e gravido di conseguenze, di cui potrei parlare; ma qui mi occupo soltanto del suo effetto su questa grande religione della semplicità. Poiché è attraverso l’atmosfera di quella religione che un uomo si fa strada, come tanti pellegrini hanno fatto, verso la meta di questo pellegrinaggio. Anche questo particolare aspetto rimase più nitidamente impresso nella mia memoria per la subitaneità con cui ne uscii. Non mi aspettavo il contrasto; ed esso può aver colorato tutte le mie esperienze successive. Scesi dal treno del deserto a Ludd, che aveva tutta l’aria di un grande accampamento nel deserto; forse abbastanza appropriatamente, giacché è il luogo natale tradizionale del soldato San Giorgio. In quel momento, tuttavia, non vi era nulla di eccitante o di romantico nel suo aspetto. Era forse insolitamente tetro; poiché era caduta una pioggia pesante; e l’acqua ristagnava in ciò che è più facile chiamare grandi pozzanghere che qualcosa di così poetico come piccole pozze. Un’automobile mandata da amici si era fermata accanto alla banchina; vi salii con una non insolita vaghezza su dove stessi andando; ed essa si inerpicò per sentieri fangosi verso una distesa di paese più ondulata, con chiazze di cactus qua e là. E poi, con una curiosa bruschezza, mi accorsi che l’intero immenso deserto era svanito, ed ero in una terra nuova. Le pianure rosso scuro si erano allontanate come un enorme incubo; e mi ritrovai in un sogno fresco e straordinariamente piacevole.
So che sembrerà fantasioso; ma per un istante sentii davvero come se fossi tornato a casa; o piuttosto a quella casa dietro la casa di cui tutti abbiamo nostalgia. La perduta memoria di essa è la vita a un tempo della fede e della fiaba. Boschetti fiammeggianti di aranci si levavano dietro siepi di grottesco cactus o fico d’India; che parevano davvero draghi verdi a guardia delle mele d’oro delle Esperidi. Su ciascun lato della strada vi erano fiori quali non ne avevo mai visti prima sotto il sole; poiché in verità pareva che avessero il sole dentro di sé piuttosto che il sole su di sé. Grappoli e folle di anemoni cremisi erano di un rosso non simboleggiabile nel sangue o nel vino; ma piuttosto nel rosso vetro che arde nella finestra dedicata a un martire. Solo in una selvaggia fiaba orientale si potrebbe raffigurare un pellegrino o un viaggiatore che trovi un tale giardino nel deserto; e pensai alla più antica fiaba di tutte e al giardino da cui venimmo. Ma vi era in essa qualcosa di ancora più sottile; che deve pur esserci nell’impressione di ogni paradiso terrestre. È vitale per un sogno simile che cose familiari si mescolino a cose fantastiche; come quando un sogno reale è colmo dei volti di vecchi amici. Passeri, che sembrano essere gli stessi in tutto il mondo, saettavano qua e là tra i fiori; ed ebbi la fantasia che fossero le anime dei passeri di città di Londra e delle fumose metropoli, ora andati là dove vanno i passeri buoni. E poco più su lungo la strada davanti a me, sulla collina tra le siepi di cactus, vidi trotterellare un grigio asino; e avrei quasi potuto giurare che fosse l’asino che avevo lasciato a casa.
Trotterellava avanti a me, e il profilo delle sue orecchie erette ed elfiche si stagliava scuro contro il cielo. Andava evidentemente da qualche parte con grande determinazione; e credetti di sapere verso quale luogo appropriato si dirigesse, e che fosse mio destino seguirlo come un presagio in movimento. Lo persi di vista più tardi, poiché dovetti completare il viaggio in treno; ma il treno seguì la medesima direzione, che saliva su colli sempre più ripidi. Cominciai a rendermi conto più chiaramente di dove fossi; e a sapere che il giardino nel deserto che era fiorito così all’improvviso intorno a me aveva portato per molti erranti del deserto il nome della terra promessa. Mentre le rocce si levavano sempre più alte da ogni lato, e pendevano su di noi come nubi terribili e tangibili, vidi nell’erba fioca dei pendii sotto di esse qualcosa che non avevo mai visto prima. Era un arcobaleno caduto sulla terra, senza alcuna sua parte contro il cielo, ma soltanto le erbe e i fiori che risplendevano attraverso le sue fini sfumature di colore infuocato. Pensai che anche questo fosse come un presagio; e in tale disposizione d’ozioso misticismo mi capitò un altro accidente che fui contento di contare per un terzo. Poiché quando il treno si fermò infine sotto la pioggia, e non vi era altro veicolo per l’ultimo tratto del viaggio, un ufficiale assai cortese, un chirurgo dell’esercito, mi diede un posto su un carro d’ambulanza; e fu sotto lo scudo della croce rossa che entrai in Gerusalemme.
Poiché all’improvviso, tra un montante del carro e uno straccio di nube piovosa, la vidi, sollevata e appartata sotto tutti gli inarcati cieli della sua storia, sola con la sua benedizione e la sua bestemmia, la città che è posta sopra un colle, e non può essere nascosta.
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CHAPTER III
THE GATES OF THE CITY
The men I met coming from Jerusalem reported all sorts of contradictory impressions; and yet my own impression contradicted them all. Their impressions were doubtless as true as mine; but I describe my own because it is true, and because I think it points to a neglected truth about the real Jerusalem. I need not say I did not expect the real Jerusalem to be the New Jerusalem; a city of 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 I was 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 side to new and vulgar things; full of the touts who seem only created for the tourists and the tourists who seem only created for the touts. There may be more of this in the place than pleases those who would idealise it. But I fancy there is much less of it than is commonly supposed in the reaction from such an ideal. It does not, like Cairo, offer the exciting experience of twenty guides fighting for one traveller; of young Turks drinking American cocktails as a protest against Christian wine. The town is quite inconvenient 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 books of Biblical research. He might remember drawings like diagrams representing a well or a wine-press, rather a dry well, so to speak, and a wine-press very difficult to associate with wine. These hard colourless outlines never did justice to the colour of the East, but even to 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 bazaars glowing 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 first impression 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 had an 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 was conscious of another which at once completed and contradicted it. It was not only like a memory of Rye, it was mixed with a memory of the Mount St. Michael, which stands among the sands of Normandy on the other side of the narrow seas. The first part of the sensation is that the traveller, as he walks the stony streets 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 sense that 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 him through the smallest cranny, or most accidental crack in rock or stone; it comes to him especially through those long narrow windows in the walls of the old fortifications; those slits in the stone through which the medieval archers used their bows and 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 from the walls of Jerusalem. Then I remembered that in the same strips of medieval landscape could be seen always, here and there, a steep hill crowned with a city of towers. And I knew I had the mystical and 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 more strange when the hill cannot anywhere be hid, even from the citizen in 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 walls and 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 Moslems late in the Middle Ages; but they are almost exactly like the walls that were being built by the Christians at or before that time. The Crusader Edward, afterwards Edward the First, reared such battlements far away among the rainy hills of Wales. I do not know what elements were originally Gothic or what originally Saracenic. The Crusaders and the Saracens constantly copied each other while they combated each other; indeed it is a fact always to be found in such combats. It is one of the arguments against war that are really 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 from the Christian invaders, and even if they are not Christian they are in many ways strangely European. The wall and gates which now stand, whatever stood before them and whatever comes after them, carry a memory of those men from the West who came here upon that wild adventure, who climbed this rock and clung to it so perilously from the victory of Godfrey to the victory of Saladin; and that is why this momentary Eastern exile reminded me so strangely of the hill of Rye and of home.
CAPITOLO III
LE PORTE DELLA CITTÀ
Gli uomini che incontravo di ritorno da Gerusalemme riferivano ogni sorta di impressioni contraddittorie; eppure la mia impressione le contraddiceva tutte. Le loro impressioni erano senza dubbio vere quanto la mia; ma io descrivo la mia perché è vera, e perché credo che essa additi una verità trascurata sulla vera Gerusalemme. Non occorre che dica che non mi aspettavo che la vera Gerusalemme fosse la Nuova Gerusalemme; una città di carità e di pace, non più di quanto una città di crisolito e di perla. Avrei potuto più ragionevolmente aspettarmi un luogo austero e ascetico, oppresso dal peso del suo destino, senza altre locande che i monasteri, e questi sigillati dal terribile silenzio dei Trappisti; una città tremenda dove gli uomini parlano per segni nella strada. Non avevo bisogno delle innumerevoli facezie sulla Gerusalemme d’oggi per essere messo in guardia dall’aspettarmi questo; comunque non me l’aspettavo, e di certo non lo trovai. Ma non trovai nemmeno ciò che ero assai più incline ad aspettarmi; qualcosa all’estremo opposto. Molti resoconti mi avevano indotto a cercare una città davvero cosmopolita, cioè una città davvero conquistata. Cercavo un luogo come il Cairo, che contenesse sì cose antiche e interessanti, ma aperto da ogni lato a cose nuove e volgari; pieno di quei procacciatori che paiono creati soltanto per i turisti e di quei turisti che paiono creati soltanto per i procacciatori. Forse di tutto questo ve n’è nel luogo più di quanto piaccia a coloro che vorrebbero idealizzarlo. Ma immagino che ve ne sia assai meno di quanto comunemente si supponga nella reazione a un tale ideale. Esso non offre, come il Cairo, l’eccitante esperienza di venti guide che si contendono un solo viaggiatore; di giovani Turchi che bevono cocktail americani come protesta contro il vino cristiano. La città è abbastanza scomoda da farne un luogo decoroso per i pellegrini. Oppure uno straniero avrebbe potuto immaginare un luogo ancor meno occidentale del Cairo, uno di quei villaggi della Palestina descritti in vecchi polverosi libri di ricerca biblica. Potrebbe ricordare disegni simili a diagrammi raffiguranti un pozzo o un torchio, un pozzo piuttosto arido, per così dire, e un torchio assai difficile da associare al vino. Questi duri contorni scoloriti non resero mai giustizia al colore dell’Oriente, ma perfino dargli il colore dell’Oriente non renderebbe giustizia a Gerusalemme. Se avessi immaginato la Bagdad di tutti i nostri sogni, un labirinto di bazar sfolgoranti di merci sontuose, avrei sbagliato di nuovo. Vi è quanto basta di questo colore vivido e vario a Gerusalemme, ma non è il primo fatto che arresta l’attenzione, e certo non il primo che arrestò la mia. Do la mia prima impressione come un fatto, per quel che vale ed esattamente come venne. Non me l’aspettavo, e passò un po’ di tempo prima che perfino la comprendessi. Non appena mi trovai a camminare dentro le mura di Gerusalemme, ebbi un’impressione travolgente di camminare nella cittadina di Rye, là dove essa guarda oltre i piatti prati marini verso Winchelsea.
Mentre cercavo di spiegarmi questo bizzarro sentimento, ero consapevole di un altro che al tempo stesso lo completava e lo contraddiceva. Non era soltanto simile a un ricordo di Rye, era mescolato a un ricordo del Monte San Michele, che sorge tra le sabbie della Normandia dall’altra parte degli stretti mari. La prima parte della sensazione è che il viaggiatore, mentre percorre le vie pietrose tra le mura, sente di trovarsi dentro una fortezza. Ma è il paradosso di un tale luogo che, mentre sente in un certo senso di essere in una prigione, sente anche di essere su un precipizio. Il senso di essere innalzato, e posto in un luogo elevato, gli giunge attraverso la più piccola fessura, o la più casuale crepa nella roccia o nella pietra; gli giunge specialmente attraverso quelle lunghe strette finestre nelle mura delle antiche fortificazioni; quelle feritoie nella pietra attraverso le quali gli arcieri medievali usavano i loro archi e gli artisti medievali usavano i loro occhi, con anche maggiore successo. Quegli scorci verdi di campi lontani in basso o di pianure lontane, che ci deliziano eppure ci fanno girare la testa (per l’essere insieme vicini e lontani) quando si vedono attraverso le finestre di Memling, spesso si possono scorgere dalle mura di Gerusalemme. Poi ricordai che nelle stesse strisce di paesaggio medievale si poteva sempre vedere, qua e là, una ripida collina coronata da una città di torri. E seppi di avere il mistico e duplice piacere di vedere una tale collina e di starvi sopra. Una città posta sopra una collina non può rimanere nascosta; ma è ancor più strano quando la collina non può in nessun luogo rimanere nascosta, nemmeno al cittadino nella città.
Allora davvero seppi che ciò che vedevo era la Gerusalemme dei Crociati; o almeno la Gerusalemme delle Crociate. Era una città medievale, con mura e porte e una cittadella, e costruita sopra una collina per essere difesa dagli arcieri. La maggior parte delle mura oggi effettivamente in piedi fu costruita dai Musulmani sul finire del Medioevo; ma sono quasi esattamente come le mura che venivano costruite dai Cristiani in quel tempo o prima di esso. Il Crociato Edoardo, poi Edoardo il Primo, innalzò tali merlature lontano tra le piovose colline del Galles. Non so quali elementi fossero in origine gotici o quali in origine saraceni. I Crociati e i Saraceni si copiavano di continuo l’un l’altro mentre si combattevano l’un l’altro; anzi è un fatto che si riscontra sempre in tali contese. È uno di quegli argomenti contro la guerra che sono davvero umani, e perciò non vengono mai usati dagli umanitari. La maledizione della guerra è che essa conduce a una maggiore imitazione internazionale; mentre in pace e in libertà gli uomini possono permettersi la varietà nazionale. Ma alcune cose in questo paese furono certamente copiate dagli invasori cristiani, e anche se non sono cristiane sono per molti versi stranamente europee. Le mura e le porte che ora si ergono, qualunque cosa le precedesse e qualunque cosa verrà dopo di esse, recano un ricordo di quegli uomini d’Occidente che vennero qui in quella folle avventura, che si arrampicarono su questa roccia e vi si aggrapparono così perigliosamente dalla vittoria di Goffredo alla vittoria del Saladino; ed è per questo che questo momentaneo esilio orientale mi rammentava così stranamente la collina di Rye e la casa.
I do not forget, of course, that all these visible walls and towers are but the battlements and pinnacles of a buried city, or of many buried cities. I do not forget that such buildings have foundations that are to us almost like fossils; the gigantic fossils of some other geological epoch. Something may be said later of those lost empires whose very masterpieces are to us like petrified monsters. From this height, after long histories unrecorded, fell the forgotten idol of the Jebusites, on that day when David’s javelin-men scaled the citadel and carried through it, in darkness behind his coloured curtains, the god whose image had never been made by man. Here was waged that endless war between the graven gods of the plain and the invisible god of the mountain; from here the hosts carrying the sacred fish of the Philistines were driven back to the sea from which their worship came. Those who worshipped on this hill had come out of bondage in Egypt and went into bondage in Babylon; small as was their country, there passed before them almost the whole pageant of the old pagan world. All its strange shapes and strong almost 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 or pre-historic interest may be touched on in its turn; but I am not dealing here 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 tied his horse to a wayside cross in the snow, and afterward saw it dangling 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 symbol the 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 Gothic town than the Babylonian; and that it reminded me, if not specially of the cross, at least of the soldiers who took the cross.
Nor do I forget the long centuries that have passed over the place since these medieval walls were built, any more than the far more interesting centuries that passed before they were built. But any one taking exception to the description on that ground may well realise, on consideration, that it is an exception that proves the rule. There is something very negative about Turkish rule; and the best and worst of it is in the word neglect. Everything that lived under the vague empire of Constantinople remained in a state of suspended animation like something frozen rather than decayed, like something sleeping rather than dead. It was a sort of Arabian spell, like that which turned princes and 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 a hundred 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 still strikes them as uncommon; as if it were the first fantastic sketch in the sketch-book of nature. I myself can never overcome the sense of something almost unearthly about grass growing upon human buildings. There is in it a wild and even horrible fancy, as if houses could grow hair. When I saw that green hair on the huge stone blocks of the 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 once of chaos and of sleep. It is said that the grass will not grow where the Turk sets his foot; but it is the other side of the same truth 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 Turk having been planted on this or that citadel; and certainly it was so planted with splendid valour and sensational victory. But this is the green banner that he plants on all his high cities in the end.
Therefore my immediate impression of the walls and gates was not contradicted by my consciousness of what came before and what came after that medieval period. It remained primarily a thing of walls and gates; a thing which the modern world does not perhaps understand so well as the medieval world. There is involved in it all that idea of definition which those who do not 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 run and where his exception shall stand. He cannot have a city that 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 agreed with each other in this, when they differed about everything else. It was true of practically all of them that when they built a city they built a citadel. That is, whatever strange thing they may have made, they regarded it as something to be defined and to be defended.
Non dimentico, naturalmente, che tutte queste mura e torri visibili non sono che i bastioni e i pinnacoli di una città sepolta, o di molte città sepolte. Non dimentico che simili edifici hanno fondamenta che per noi sono quasi come fossili; i giganteschi fossili di qualche altra epoca geologica. Qualcosa potrà dirsi più avanti di quegli imperi perduti i cui stessi capolavori sono per noi come mostri pietrificati. Da questa altura, dopo lunghe storie non registrate, cadde l’idolo dimenticato dei Gebusei, in quel giorno in cui i giavellottieri di Davide scalarono la cittadella e vi trasportarono, nell’oscurità dietro le sue cortine variopinte, il dio la cui immagine non era mai stata fatta da mano d’uomo. Qui si combatté quella guerra senza fine tra gli dèi scolpiti della pianura e il dio invisibile della montagna; di qui le schiere che portavano il pesce sacro dei Filistei furono ricacciate verso il mare da cui proveniva il loro culto. Coloro che adoravano su questo colle erano usciti dalla schiavitù in Egitto e andarono nella schiavitù a Babilonia; per quanto piccolo fosse il loro paese, passò dinanzi a loro quasi l’intero corteo dell’antico mondo pagano. Tutte le sue forme strane e i suoi colori forti, quasi crudeli, permangono negli scritti dei loro profeti; la cui frase più lieve sembra più pesante delle piramidi d’Egitto; e le cui parole stesse sono come tori alati che camminano. Tutto questo interesse storico o preistorico potrà essere trattato a suo tempo; ma qui non mi occupo dei segreti storici dissepolti dallo studio del luogo, bensì delle associazioni storiche suscitate dalla sua vista. Il viaggiatore si trova nella condizione di quel celebre bizzarro personaggio che legò il suo cavallo a una croce lungo la via nella neve, e in seguito lo vide penzolare dalla guglia della chiesa di quella che era stata una città sepolta. Ma qui la croce non si erge come sulla cima di una guglia; bensì come sulla cima di un obelisco egizio a Roma, — dove i sacerdoti hanno posto una croce in cima al monumento pagano; per timore che esso cammini. Condivido interamente il loro sentimento; e cercherò di suggerire più avanti perché ritengo quel simbolo il culmine logico tanto delle cose pagane quanto di quelle cristiane. Il viaggiatore del racconto di viaggio alzò finalmente lo sguardo e vide, dalle strade in basso lontane, la guglia e la croce dominare una città gotica. Se io alzassi lo sguardo in una visione e la vedessi dominare una città babilonese, che ostruiva i cieli con palazzi e templi mostruosi, riterrei ugualmente naturale che dominasse. Ma il punto qui è che ciò che vidi sopra il suolo era piuttosto la città gotica che quella babilonese; e che mi rammentava, se non specialmente la croce, almeno i soldati che presero la croce.
Né dimentico i lunghi secoli che sono trascorsi sul luogo da quando furono costruite queste mura medievali, più di quanto dimentichi i secoli assai più interessanti che passarono prima che fossero costruite. Ma chiunque sollevi obiezione alla descrizione su tale fondamento potrà bene rendersi conto, a riflettervi, che si tratta di un’eccezione che conferma la regola. V’è qualcosa di assai negativo nel dominio turco; e il meglio e il peggio di esso stanno nella parola incuria. Tutto ciò che visse sotto il vago impero di Costantinopoli rimase in uno stato di animazione sospesa, come qualcosa di congelato piuttosto che di decomposto, come qualcosa che dorme piuttosto che morto. Era una sorta di incantesimo arabo, come quello che tramutava principi e principesse in statue di marmo nelle Mille e una notte. Tutta quella parte della storia del luogo è una specie di sonno; e quello di un dormiente che a stento sa se ha dormito un’ora o cent’anni. Quando mi trovai per la prima volta alla Porta di Giaffa di Gerusalemme, il mio occhio cadde per caso su qualcosa che si sarebbe potuto vedere dovunque, ma che pareva in qualche modo avere là un curioso significato. La maggior parte delle persone è consapevole di qualche oggetto comune che pure la colpisce come non comune; come se fosse il primo fantastico schizzo nell’album degli schizzi-libro della natura. Io stesso non riesco mai a vincere la sensazione di qualcosa di quasi ultraterreno nell’erba che cresce sugli edifici umani. V’è in ciò una fantasia selvaggia e persino orribile, come se le case potessero mettere capelli. Quando vidi quella verde capigliatura sugli enormi blocchi di pietra della cittadella, benché avessi visto la stessa cosa su un numero qualsiasi di rovine, essa mi giunse come un presagio o una visione, una curiosa visione insieme di caos e di sonno. Si dice che l’erba non cresca dove il Turco pone il piede; ma è l’altra faccia della medesima verità dire che essa crescerebbe dovunque tranne dove dovrebbe crescere. E benché in questo caso non fosse che un caso fortuito e un simbolo, era un simbolo verissimo. Parliamo del verde vessillo del Turco piantato su questa o quella cittadella; e certamente fu così piantato con splendido valore e sensazionale vittoria. Ma questo è il verde vessillo che egli pianta alla fine su tutte le sue alte città.
Perciò la mia immediata impressione delle mura e delle porte non era contraddetta dalla mia coscienza di ciò che venne prima e di ciò che venne dopo quel periodo medievale. Rimaneva primariamente una cosa di mura e di porte; una cosa che il mondo moderno forse non comprende così bene come il mondo medievale. In essa è implicata tutta quell’idea di definizione che coloro cui non piace amano descrivere come dogma. Un muro è come la regola; e le porte sono come le eccezioni che confermano la regola. L’uomo che lo costruisce deve decidere dove correrà la sua regola e dove starà la sua eccezione. Non può avere una città che sia tutta porte più di quanto possa avere una casa che sia tutta finestre; né è possibile avere una legge che consista interamente di libertà. Le antiche stirpi e religioni che si contesero questa città concordavano tra loro in questo, quand’anche differissero su ogni altra cosa. Era vero per praticamente tutte esse che quando costruivano una città costruivano una cittadella. Vale a dire, qualunque strana cosa avessero fatto, la consideravano come qualcosa da definire e da difendere.
And from this standpoint the holy city was a happy city; it had no suburbs. That is to say, there are all sorts of buildings outside the wall; but they are outside the wall. Everybody is conscious of being inside or outside a boundary; but it is the whole character of the true suburbs which grow round our great industrial 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 city from within, nor by the resistance of the lands round about. It destroys at once the dignity of a town and the freedom of a countryside. The citizens are too new and numerous for citizenship; yet they never learn what there is to be learned of the ancient traditions of agriculture. The first sight of the sharp outline of Jerusalem is like a memory of the older types of limitation and liberty. Happy is the city that has a wall; and happier still if it is 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 cave at Bethlehem traditionally connected with the Nativity that the sceptics doubt whether any beasts of burden could have entered a stable that has to be reached by such steps. And indeed to any one in a modern city like London or Liverpool it may well appear odd, like a cab-horse climbing a ladder. But as a matter of fact, if the asses and goats of Jerusalem could not go up and downstairs, they could not go anywhere. However this may be, I mention the matter here merely as adding another touch to that angular profile which is the impression involved here. Strangely enough, there is something that leads up to this impression even in the labyrinth of mountains through which the road winds its way to the city. The hills round Jerusalem are themselves often hewn out in terraces, like a huge stairway. This is mostly for the practical and indeed profitable purpose of vineyards; and serves for a reminder that this ancient seat of civilisation has not lost the tradition of the mercy and the glory of the vine. But in outline such a mountain looks much like the mountain of 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 produced by this mountain city; and especially by its wall with gates like a house with windows. A gate, like a window, is primarily a picture-frame. The pictures that are found within the frame are indeed very various and sometimes very alien. Within this frame-work are 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 temporary and 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 all this 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 upon himself a shape.
Such a system of walls and gates, like many other things thought rude and 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 modern cities through a litter of slums. And there is no better way to get a preliminary plan of the city than to follow the wall and fix the gates in the memory. Suppose, for instance, that a man begins in the south with the Zion Gate, which bears the ancient name of Jerusalem. This, to begin with, will sharpen the medieval and even the Western impression first because it is here that he has the strongest sentiment of threading the narrow passages of a great castle; but also because the very name of the gate was given to this south-western hill by Godfrey and Tancred during the period of the Latin kingdom. I believe it is one of the problems of the scholars why the Latin conquerors called this hill the Zion Hill, when the other is obviously the sacred hill. Jerusalem is traditionally divided into four hills, but for practical purposes into two; the lower eastern hill where stood the Temple, and now stands the great Mosque, and the western where is the citadel and the Zion Gate to the south of it. I know nothing of such questions; and I attach no importance to the notion that has crossed my own mind, and which I only mention in 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 place before it was stormed by David; and even afterwards the Jebusites remained on this western hill, and some compromise seems to have been made with them. Is it conceivable, I wonder, that even in the twelfth century there lingered some local memory of what had once been a way of distinguishing Sion of the Jebusites from Salem of 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 stands on the other hill to the east. The great Mosque of Omar stands up like a peacock, lustrous with mosaics that are like plumes of blue and green.
E da questo punto di vista la santa città era una città felice; non aveva sobborghi. Vale a dire che vi sono ogni sorta di edifici al di fuori delle mura; ma essi stanno al di fuori delle mura. Ciascuno è consapevole di trovarsi dentro o fuori un confine; ma è l’intero carattere dei veri sobborghi che crescono attorno alle nostre grandi città industriali quello di crescere, per così dire, inconsciamente e ciecamente, come l’erba che ricopre una linea di confine tracciata sulla terra. Questa espansione indefinita non è governata né dall’anima della città dall’interno, né dalla resistenza delle terre circostanti. Essa distrugge a un tempo la dignità di una città e la libertà di una campagna. I cittadini sono troppo nuovi e troppo numerosi per la cittadinanza; eppure non apprendono mai ciò che vi è da apprendere delle antiche tradizioni dell’agricoltura. La prima visione del profilo netto di Gerusalemme è come un ricordo delle forme più antiche di limite e di libertà. Felice la città che ha un muro; e più felice ancora se esso è un precipizio.
Ancora, Gerusalemme potrebbe essere chiamata una città di scalinate. Molte strade sono ripide e la maggior parte è addirittura intagliata in gradini. Costituisce, credo, un elemento nella controversia intorno alla grotta di Betlemme tradizionalmente collegata alla Natività il fatto che gli scettici dubitino che una qualche bestia da soma abbia potuto entrare in una stalla che si deve raggiungere per simili gradini. E in verità a chiunque, in una città moderna come Londra o Liverpool, potrà bene apparire strano, come un cavallo da vettura che scali una scala a pioli. Ma di fatto, se gli asini e le capre di Gerusalemme non potessero salire e scendere per le scale, non potrebbero andare in alcun luogo. Comunque sia, menziono la cosa qui soltanto come un tocco ulteriore a quel profilo spigoloso che è l’impressione qui in questione. Stranamente, vi è qualcosa che conduce a questa impressione già nel labirinto di montagne attraverso il quale la strada si snoda verso la città. Le colline attorno a Gerusalemme sono esse stesse spesso scavate in terrazze, come un’enorme gradinata. Ciò avviene per lo più per lo scopo pratico e in verità proficuo dei vigneti; e serve a rammentare che questa antica sede della civiltà non ha perduto la tradizione della misericordia e della gloria della vite. Ma nel suo profilo una tale montagna somiglia assai al monte del Purgatorio che Dante vide nella sua visione, sollevato in terrazze, come titaniche scale verso Dio. E in verità anche questa forma è simbolica; simbolica quanto il profilo appuntito della Santa Città. Poiché un credo è come una scala, mentre un’evoluzione è soltanto come un pendio. Un’evoluzione spirituale e sociale è generalmente un pendio piuttosto scivoloso; un pendio fangoso lungo il quale è assai facile scivolare di nuovo in basso.
Tale è pressappoco la netta e persino brusca impressione prodotta da questa città montana; e specialmente dalle sue mura con porte simili a una casa con finestre. Una porta, come una finestra, è anzitutto una cornice di quadro. I quadri che si trovano entro la cornice sono in verità assai vari e talvolta assai estranei. Entro questa incorniciatura si trovano cose interamente asiatiche, o interamente musulmane, o persino interamente nomadi. Ma Gerusalemme stessa non è nomade. Nulla potrebbe assomigliare meno a un mero accampamento di tende piantate dagli Arabi. Nulla potrebbe assomigliare meno al mero caos di colore di un bazar provvisorio e vistoso. Gli Arabi vi sono e i colori vi sono, e formano un quadro glorioso; ma il quadro è in una cornice gotica, ed è veduto, per così dire, attraverso una finestra gotica. E il significato di tutto ciò è il significato di tutte le finestre, e specialmente delle finestre gotiche. È che perfino la luce stessa è più divina entro certi limiti; e che perfino colui che risplende è più risplendente quando assume su di sé una forma.
Un tale sistema di mura e di porte, come molte altre cose ritenute rozze e primitive, è in realtà quanto mai razionalistico. Esso trasforma la città, per così dire, in una pianta di se stessa, e persino in una guida di se stessa. Ciò è particolarmente vero, come si potrà suggerire tra un istante, riguardo alla direzione delle strade che ne conducono fuori. Ma in ogni caso, un uomo deve decidere per quale via lascerà la città; egli non può semplicemente lasciarsi trascinare fuori dalla città come ci si lascia trascinare fuori dalle città moderne attraverso un disordine di quartieri poveri. E non vi è modo migliore per farsi una pianta preliminare della città che seguire le mura e fissare le porte nella memoria. Si supponga, per esempio, che un uomo cominci a mezzogiorno dalla Porta di Sion, che reca l’antico nome di Gerusalemme. Questo, per cominciare, acuirà l’impressione medievale e persino occidentale, anzitutto perché è qui che egli ha il più forte sentimento di percorrere gli stretti passaggi di un grande castello; ma anche perché il nome stesso della porta fu dato a questo colle sud-occidentale da Goffredo e Tancredi durante il periodo del regno latino. Credo sia uno dei problemi degli eruditi perché i conquistatori latini chiamassero questo colle il Colle di Sion, quando l’altro è manifestamente il colle sacro. Gerusalemme è tradizionalmente divisa in quattro colli, ma per fini pratici in due; il più basso colle orientale ove sorgeva il Tempio, e ora sorge la grande Moschea, e quello occidentale ove si trovano la cittadella e la Porta di Sion a mezzogiorno di essa. Io non so nulla di simili questioni; e non attribuisco alcuna importanza all’idea che ha attraversato la mia stessa mente, e che menziono soltanto di passaggio, poiché non ho dubbio che vi siano cento obiezioni ad essa. Ma è noto che Sion o Zion era l’antico nome del luogo prima che venisse preso d’assalto da Davide; e persino in seguito i Gebusei rimasero su questo colle occidentale, e sembra che con essi si sia giunti a un qualche compromesso. È concepibile, mi domando, che persino nel dodicesimo secolo permanesse qualche memoria locale di ciò che un tempo era stato un modo di distinguere la Sion dei Gebusei dalla Salem degli Ebrei? La Porta di Sion, tuttavia, è qui soltanto un punto di partenza; se da essa procediamo verso sud-est, discendiamo un sentiero ripido e roccioso, dal quale si può cogliere la prima e più bella visione di ciò che sorge sull’altro colle a oriente. La grande Moschea di Omar si erge come un pavone, lucente di mosaici che sono come piume di azzurro e di verde.
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 was not built by Omar. But it is my fixed intention to call it the Mosque of Omar, and with ever renewed pertinacity to continue calling it the Mosque of Omar. I possess a special permit from the Grand Mufti to call it the Mosque of Omar. He is the head of 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 place the Mosque of Omar, since the great Caliph desired and even designed such a building, though he did not build it. I suppose it is rather 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 were telescoped together by the excellent common sense of vulgar tradition. There could not be a better example of that great truth for all travellers; that popular tradition is never so right as when it is 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, I answer that Westminster Abbey is not used as an Abbey. But modern Englishmen would be much surprised if I were to refer to it as Westminster Church; to say nothing of the many modern Englishmen for whom it would be more suitable to call it Westminster Museum. And for whatever purposes the Moslems may actually use their great and glorious sanctuary, at least they have not allowed it 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 eastern plateau in place of the Temple; and the wall that runs round to it on the south side of the city contains only the Dung Gate, on which the fancy need not linger. All along outside this wall the ground falls away into the southern valley; and upon the dreary and stony steep opposite is the place called Acaldama. Wall and valley turn together round the corner of the great temple platform, and confronting the eastern wall, across the ravine, is the mighty wall of the Mount of Olives. On this side there are several gates now blocked up, of which the most famous, the Golden Gate, carries in its very uselessness a testimony to the fallen warriors of the cross. For there is a strange Moslem 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 Dome of the Rock; and standing near it, a man may see for the first time in the distance, another dome. It lies away to the west, but a little to 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 huddle of houses, that a man may first see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which 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 things near 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 Court of 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 city seemed to be heaped higher; and across the valley on the skirts of 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 bears the name of Herod; though it might well bear the name either of Godfrey or Saladin. For just outside it stands a pine-tree, and beside it a rude bulk of stone; where stood these great captains in turn, before they took Jerusalem. Then the wall runs on till it comes to the great Damascus Gate, graven I know not why 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 that the roses on the walls are not the Western roses of York or Lancaster, or that the swords which guarded them were not the straight swords of England or of France. Doubtless a deeper and more solemn memory ought to return immediately to the mind where that gate looks down the 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 such alien or awful things. I did not think of damask or damascene or the great Arabian city or even the conversion of St. Paul. I thought of my own little house in Buckinghamshire, and how the edge of 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 more rational and even utilitarian than the fashions of modernity. When a street in a new suburb is called Pretoria Avenue, the clerk living there does not set out from his villa with the cheerful hope of finding the road lead him to Pretoria. But the man leaving Aylesbury End does know it would lead him to Aylesbury; and the man going 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 something else as well.
Gli studiosi, posso dirlo qui, obiettano che la si chiami la Moschea di Omar; sul meschino e pedantesco fondamento che non è una moschea e non fu costruita da Omar. Ma è mia ferma intenzione chiamarla la Moschea di Omar, e con pertinacia sempre rinnovata continuare a chiamarla la Moschea di Omar. Possiedo uno speciale permesso dal Gran Muftì di chiamarla la Moschea di Omar. Egli è il capo dell’intera religione musulmana, e se non lo sa lui, chi lo sa? Mi disse, nel bel francese che si accorda ai suoi bei modi, che non è poi così ridicolo, dopotutto, chiamare il luogo la Moschea di Omar, giacché il grande Califfo desiderò e persino ideò un tale edificio, benché non lo costruisse. Suppongo sia piuttosto come se il Tempio di Salomone fosse stato chiamato il Tempio di Davide. Omar fu un grand’uomo e la Moschea fu una grande opera, e i due furono compendiati insieme dall’eccellente buon senso della tradizione popolare. Non vi potrebbe essere esempio migliore di quella grande verità valida per tutti i viaggiatori; che la tradizione popolare non ha mai tanta ragione come quando ha torto; e che la pedanteria non ha mai tanto torto come quando ha ragione. E quanto all’altra obiezione, che la Cupola della Roccia (per darle il suo altro nome) non è realmente adoperata come Moschea, rispondo che l’Abbazia di Westminster non è adoperata come Abbazia. Ma gli inglesi moderni sarebbero assai sorpresi se io mi riferissi ad essa come alla Chiesa di Westminster; per non dir nulla dei molti inglesi moderni per i quali sarebbe più conveniente chiamarla il Museo di Westminster. E per qualunque scopo i musulmani effettivamente adoperino il loro grande e glorioso santuario, almeno non hanno permesso che divenisse la casa privata di un particolare ricco signore. Ed è ciò che noi abbiamo lasciato accadere, se non all’Abbazia di Westminster, almeno all’Abbazia di Welbeck.
La Moschea di Omar (lo ripeto con fermezza) sorge sul grande altopiano orientale al posto del Tempio; e le mura che le girano attorno sul lato meridionale della città contengono soltanto la Porta del Letame, sulla quale la fantasia non ha bisogno di indugiare. Lungo tutto l’esterno di queste mura il terreno declina nella valle meridionale; e sulla tetra e pietrosa erta di fronte è il luogo chiamato Acaldama. Muro e valle svoltano insieme all’angolo della grande spianata del tempio, e di fronte al muro orientale, attraverso il burrone, è il possente muro del Monte degli Ulivi. Su questo lato vi sono parecchie porte ora murate, di cui la più famosa, la Porta d’Oro, reca nella sua stessa inutilità una testimonianza ai guerrieri caduti della croce. Poiché vi è una strana leggenda musulmana secondo cui attraverso questa porta, così solennemente sigillata, cavalcherà il Re cristiano che di nuovo regnerà in Gerusalemme. Nel mezzo del recinto quadrato si eleva la grande scura Cupola della Roccia; e stando presso di essa, un uomo può vedere per la prima volta in lontananza un’altra cupola. Essa giace lontano verso occidente, ma un poco a settentrione; ed è sormontata non da una mezzaluna ma da una croce. Molti eroi e santi re hanno desiderato vedere questa cosa, e non l’hanno vista.
È assai caratteristico della città, col suo medievale guazzabuglio e accalcarsi di case, che un uomo possa vedere per la prima volta la Chiesa del Santo Sepolcro, che è a occidente, andando il più lontano possibile verso oriente. Tutte le vedute sono scorci; e cose lontane possono essere visibili e cose vicine invisibili. Il viaggiatore si imbatte nella cupola musulmana svoltando un angolo; e trova la cupola cristiana, per così dire, dietro le proprie spalle. Ma se prosegue lungo le mura fino all’angolo nord-orientale del Cortile del Tempio, troverà l’ingresso successivo; la Porta di Santo Stefano. Sul pendio esterno, per strana e appropriata coincidenza, le pietre sparse che giacciono da ogni lato della montuosa città parevano ammucchiarsi più alte; e di là dalla valle, sulle falde del Monte degli Ulivi, è il grande grigio ulivo del Getsemani.
Sul lato settentrionale la valle si muta in un fossato artificiale, poiché il terreno qui è più alto; e la porta successiva o settentrionale porta il nome di Erode; benché potrebbe bene portare il nome o di Goffredo o del Saladino. Poiché proprio al suo esterno sorge un pino, e accanto ad esso una rozza mole di pietra; dove stettero questi grandi capitani a turno, prima di prendere Gerusalemme. Poi le mura corrono avanti fino a giungere alla grande Porta di Damasco, scolpita non so perché con grandi rose in uno stile del tutto araldico e occidentale, e in nessun modo atto a rammentarci le ricche rose di Damasco; benché il loro nome sia passato nella nostra stessa lingua e tradizione inglese, insieme a un’altra parola per la delicata decorazione della spada. Ma a prima vista, in ogni caso, è difficile credere che le rose sulle mura non siano le rose occidentali di York o Lancaster, o che le spade che le custodivano non fossero le dritte spade d’Inghilterra o di Francia. Senza dubbio un più profondo e più solenne ricordo dovrebbe tornare immediatamente alla mente là dove quella porta guarda giù per la grande strada maestra; come se si potesse vedere, sospesa su di essa nel cielo per sempre, la nube che cela il fulgore di sole che incombe sulla via di Damasco. Ma qui sto solo confessando i fatti o le fantasie della mia prima impressione; e di nuovo la fantasia che mi venne per prima non fu di cose così aliene o tremende. Non pensai al damasco né al damasceno né alla grande città araba e nemmeno alla conversione di San Paolo. Pensai alla mia piccola casa nel Buckinghamshire, e a come il margine della cittadina di provincia dove essa sorge sia chiamato Aylesbury End, semplicemente perché è l’angolo più prossimo ad Aylesbury. È questo che intendo dicendo che queste antiche usanze sono più razionali e persino più utilitarie delle mode della modernità. Quando una via in un nuovo sobborgo è chiamata Pretoria Avenue, l’impiegato che vi abita non parte dalla sua villa con la lieta speranza di trovare che la strada lo conduca a Pretoria. Ma l’uomo che lascia Aylesbury End sa bene che lo condurrebbe ad Aylesbury; e l’uomo che usciva dalla Porta di Damasco sapeva bene che lo avrebbe condotto a Damasco. E lo stesso vale per il prossimo e ultimo dei vecchi ingressi, la Porta di Giaffa a oriente; ma quando vidi quella vidi anche qualcos’altro ancora.
I have heard that there is a low doorway at the entrance to a famous shrine which is called the Gate of Humility; but indeed in this sense all gates are gates of humility, and especially gates of this kind. Any one who has ever looked at a landscape under an archway will know what I mean, when I say that it sharpens a pleasure with a strange sentiment of privilege. It adds to the grace of distance something that makes it not only a grace but a gift. Such are the visions of remote places that appear in the low gateways of 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 come suddenly 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 at the side of one of these humble and human gateways there is a great gap in the wall, with a wide road running through it. There is something of 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 Men of Gotham. It suggests the old joke about the man who made a 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 impression of 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 has a way of sounding false. We shall now probably weary the world with calling the Germans barbaric, just as we very recently wearied the world with calling them cultured and progressive and scientific. But the thing is true though we say it a thousand times. And any one who wishes to understand the sense in which it is true has only to contemplate that 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 sacrifice of the permanent to the temporary. When the walls of the Holy City were overthrown for the glory of the German Emperor, it was hardly even for that everlasting glory which has been the vision and the temptation of great men. It was for the glory of a single day. It was something rather in the nature of a holiday than anything that 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 say that it destroyed a trophy to make a triumph. There is the true barbaric touch in this oblivion of what Jerusalem would look like a century after, or a year after, or even the day after. It is this which distinguishes the savage tribe on the march after a victory from the civilised army establishing a government, even if it be a tyranny. Hence the very effect of it, like the effect of the whole Prussian adventure in history, remains something negative and even nihilistic. The Christians made the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Moslems made the Mosque of Omar; but this is what the most scientific culture made at the end of the great century of science. It made an enormous hole. The only positive contribution of the nineteenth century to the spot is an unnaturally ugly clock, at the top of an ornamental tower, or a tower that was meant to be ornamental. It was erected, I believe, to commemorate the reign of 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 more tremendous negative effect of the gap by the gate. That remains a parable as 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 broad road that has led already to destruction.
The gap remains like a gash, a sort of wound in the walls; but it only 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 rather deepens than dies away. It is supported more than many would suppose even by the figures that appear in the gateways or pass in procession under the walls. The brown Franciscans and the white Dominicans would alone give some colour to a memory of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem; and there are other examples and effects which are less 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 white head-dress very like those we have all seen in a hundred pictures of tournaments or hunting parties, or the Canterbury Pilgrimage or 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 certain freedom and dignity in her movement, which is quite different at least from the shuffling walk of the shrouded Moslem women. She is a woman of Bethlehem, where a tradition, it is said, still claims as 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 one which 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 disappointed with 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 frightened of 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 orchards of Normandy or the hop-fields of Kent.
Ho sentito dire che vi è un basso portale all’ingresso di un celebre santuario, che è chiamato la Porta dell’Umiltà; ma in verità, in questo senso, tutte le porte sono porte dell’umiltà, e specialmente le porte di questa specie. Chiunque abbia mai guardato un paesaggio sotto un arco saprà che cosa intendo, quando dico che esso affina un piacere con uno strano sentimento di privilegio. Aggiunge alla grazia della lontananza qualcosa che la rende non soltanto una grazia, ma un dono. Tali sono le visioni di luoghi remoti che appaiono nelle basse porte di una città gotica; come se ciascuna porta conducesse in un mondo separato; e quasi come se ogni cupola di cielo fosse una camera diversa. Ma colui che percorre le mura di questa città in questo spirito si imbatterà d’improvviso in un’eccezione che lo sorprenderà come un terremoto. Sembra invero piuttosto qualcosa fatto da un terremoto; un terremoto dotato di un mezzo scemo senso dell’umorismo. Immediatamente accanto a una di queste umili e umane porte vi è un grande squarcio nel muro, con un’ampia strada che vi passa attraverso. Vi è qualcosa di irragionevole nella vista, che colpisce l’occhio non meno della ragione. Richiama alla mente qualche folle racconto sulle grandi imprese dei Savi di Gotham. Suggerisce la vecchia facezia sull’uomo che praticò un piccolo foro per il gattino non meno che un grande foro per il gatto. Tutti ne hanno letto a quest’ora; ma l’impressione immediata di esso non è meramente un effetto della lettura né tantomeno del ragionamento. Appare sbilenco; come qualcosa fatto da un gigante con un occhio solo. Ma fu fatto dall’ultimo principe del grande sistema imperiale prussiano, in quello che fu probabilmente il momento più orgoglioso di tutta la sua vita di orgoglio.
Ciò che è vero ha il modo di suonare trito; e ciò che è trito ha il modo di suonare falso. Ora probabilmente stancheremo il mondo chiamando barbari i Tedeschi, così come assai di recente abbiamo stancato il mondo chiamandoli colti e progrediti e scientifici. Ma la cosa è vera, benché la si dica mille volte. E chiunque desideri comprendere il senso in cui essa è vera non ha che da contemplare quella fantasia e quella fallacia nella pietra; una porta con una strada aperta accanto. La qualità che intendo, tuttavia, non sta soltanto in quel particolare contrasto; come di un portone d’ingresso ritto da solo in un campo aperto. Sta anche nell’origine, nell’occasione e nell’intera storia della cosa. Vi è soprattutto questo supremo marchio del barbaro; il sacrificio del permanente al temporaneo. Quando le mura della Santa Città furono abbattute per la gloria dell’Imperatore tedesco, ciò non fu neppure per quella gloria eterna che è stata la visione e la tentazione dei grandi uomini. Fu per la gloria di un solo giorno. Fu qualcosa piuttosto della natura di una festività che qualcosa che potesse essere, anche nel senso più vanaglorioso, un’eredità. Non fece, nel senso ordinario, un monumento, né persino un trofeo. Distrusse un monumento per fare un corteo. Potremmo quasi dire che distrusse un trofeo per fare un trionfo. Vi è il vero tocco barbarico in questo oblio di ciò che Gerusalemme sarebbe apparsa un secolo dopo, o un anno dopo, o persino il giorno dopo. È questo che distingue la tribù selvaggia in marcia dopo una vittoria dall’esercito civilizzato che istituisce un governo, anche se fosse una tirannide. Perciò il suo stesso effetto, come l’effetto dell’intera avventura prussiana nella storia, resta qualcosa di negativo e persino di nichilistico. I Cristiani fecero la Chiesa del Santo Sepolcro e i Musulmani fecero la Moschea di Omar; ma questo è ciò che la cultura più scientifica fece alla fine del grande secolo della scienza. Fece un enorme buco. L’unico contributo positivo del diciannovesimo secolo a quel luogo è un orologio innaturalmente brutto, in cima a una torre ornamentale, o a una torre che era intesa come ornamentale. Fu eretta, credo, per commemorare il regno di Abdul Hamid; e sembra perfettamente adatta al suo scopo, come uno dei sonetti di Sir William Watson sul medesimo argomento. Ma questo oggetto non fa che aggiungere un tocco di trivialità al ben più tremendo effetto negativo dello squarcio accanto alla porta. Quello resta una parabola non meno che un enigma, sotto tutti i cieli mutevoli del giorno e della notte; con le ombre che si radunano sotto la stretta Porta dell’Umiltà; e accanto ad essa, vuota come l’alba e repentina come un abisso, l’ampia strada che ha già condotto alla perdizione.
Lo squarcio resta come uno sfregio, una sorta di ferita nelle mura; ma esso non fa che rafforzare per contrasto il senso generale della loro continuità. Salvo questo unico angolo dove il diciannovesimo secolo è penetrato, la vaga impressione del tredicesimo o quattordicesimo secolo si approfondisce anziché svanire. Essa è sostenuta più di quanto molti supporrebbero anche dalle figure che appaiono nelle porte o passano in corteo sotto le mura. I bruni Francescani e i bianchi Domenicani da soli darebbero un po’ di colore a un ricordo del regno latino di Gerusalemme; e vi sono altri esempi ed effetti che meno facilmente si immaginano in Occidente. Così, mentre guardo giù per la strada, vedo uscire da sotto un arco una donna che porta un alto copricapo bianco assai simile a quelli che tutti abbiamo veduto in cento raffigurazioni di tornei o di partite di caccia, o del Pellegrinaggio di Canterbury o della Corte di Luigi XI. Ella è bianca come una donna del Nord; e non è, credo, del tutto fantasioso rintracciare una certa libertà e dignità nel suo incedere, che è quanto meno assai diverso dal passo strascicato delle donne musulmane velate. È una donna di Betlemme, dove una tradizione, si dice, rivendica ancora come eroica eredità il sangue dei cavalieri latini della croce. Questo è, naturalmente, soltanto un aspetto della città; ma è uno che si può notare fin dai primi tempi, eppure uno che è generalmente trascurato. Come ho detto, mi ero aspettato molte cose da Gerusalemme, ma non mi ero aspettato questo. Mi ero aspettato di rimanerne deluso, come da un luogo del tutto profanato e caduto al di sotto della sua missione. Mi ero aspettato di esserne soggiogato di reverenza; anzi mi ero aspettato di averne timore, come di un luogo consacrato e persino condannato dalla sua missione. Ma non avevo mai immaginato che sarebbe stato possibile affezionarmisi; come ci si potrebbe affezionare a una piccola città murata tra i frutteti della Normandia o i campi di luppolo del Kent.
And just then there happened a coincidence that was also something like a catastrophe. I was idly watching, as it moved down the narrow street to one of the dark doorways, the head-dress, like a tower of white drapery, belonging to the Christian woman from the place where Christ was born. After she had disappeared into the darkness of the porch I continued to look vaguely at the porch, and thought how easily it might have been a small Gothic gate in some old corner of Rouen, or even Canterbury. In twenty such places in the town one may see the details that appeal to the same associations, so different and so distant. One may see that angular dogtooth ornament that makes the round Norman gateways look like the gaping mouths of sharks. One may see the pointed niches in the walls, shaped like windows and serving somewhat the purpose of brackets, on which were to stand sacred images possibly removed by the Moslems. One may come upon a small court planted with ornamental trees with some monument in the centre, which makes the precise impression of something in a small French town. There are no Gothic spires, but there are numberless Gothic doors and windows; and he who first strikes the place at this angle, as it were, may well feel the Northern element as native and the Eastern element as intrusive. While I was thinking all these things, something happened which in that 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 whole air 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 coming up 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 splash of paler vapour; a wan white cloud whose white seemed somehow more ominous than gloom. It went over the high citadel like a white wild goose flying; and a few white feathers fell.
It was the snow; and it snowed day and night until that Eastern city was sealed up like a village in Norway or Northern Scotland. It rose in the streets till men might almost have been drowned in it like a sea of solid foam. And the people of the place told me 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 scene in so dreamy a fashion, it seemed merely like a dramatic conclusion to 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 roofs and turrets of the mountain town; for there is an aspect in which snow looks less like frozen water than like solidified light. As the snow accumulated there accumulated also everywhere those fantastic effects of frost which seem to fit in with the fantastic qualities of medieval architecture; and which make an icicle seem like the mere extension of a gargoyle. It was the atmosphere that has led so many romancers to make medieval Paris a mere black and white study of night and snow. Something had redrawn in silver all things from the rude ornament on the old gateways to the wrinkles on the ancient hills of Moab. Fields of white still spotted with green swept down into the valleys between us and the hills; and high above them the Holy City lifted her head into the thunder-clouded heavens, wearing a white head-dress like a daughter of the Crusaders.
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E proprio allora avvenne una coincidenza che era anche qualcosa di simile a una catastrofe. Osservavo oziosamente, mentre scendeva lungo la stretta via verso uno dei bui portali, il copricapo, come una torre di bianco panneggio, appartenente alla donna cristiana del luogo dove nacque Cristo. Dopo che ella fu scomparsa nell’oscurità del porticato, continuai a guardare vagamente il porticato, e pensai a quanto facilmente esso avrebbe potuto essere una piccola porta gotica in qualche vecchio angolo di Rouen, o perfino di Canterbury. In venti luoghi simili nella città si possono scorgere i dettagli che si richiamano alle stesse associazioni, così diverse e così lontane. Si può vedere quell’ornamento angolare a dente di cane che fa parere i tondi portali normanni come le fauci spalancate di squali. Si possono vedere le nicchie appuntite nei muri, foggiate come finestre e servienti in qualche modo allo scopo di mensole, sulle quali dovevano posare sacre immagini forse rimosse dai Musulmani. Ci si può imbattere in una piccola corte piantata di alberi ornamentali con qualche monumento al centro, che dà la precisa impressione di qualcosa di una piccola cittadina francese. Non vi sono guglie gotiche, ma vi sono innumerevoli porte e finestre gotiche; e chi per primo coglie il luogo da questa angolatura, per così dire, può ben sentire l’elemento nordico come nativo e l’elemento orientale come intruso. Mentre pensavo tutte queste cose, accadde qualcosa che in quel luogo era quasi un portento.
Faceva molto freddo; e c’erano colori curiosi nel cielo. Erano cadute gelide piogge di tempo in tempo; e tutta l’aria pareva aver preso qualcosa di più tagliente di un gelo. Era come se una porta fosse stata aperta nell’angolo settentrionale dei cieli, lasciando entrare qualcosa che mutava tutto il volto della terra. Grandi nuvole grigie con aloni di perla livida e di verde pallido salivano dalle pianure o dal mare e si spandevano sulle torri della città. In mezzo alla massa mobile dei grigi vapori v’era uno schizzo di vapore più pallido; una smorta nuvola bianca il cui candore pareva in qualche modo più sinistro della tenebra. Passò sull’alta cittadella come una bianca oca selvatica in volo; e caddero poche piume bianche.
Era la neve; e nevicò giorno e notte finché quella orientale città fu sigillata come un villaggio in Norvegia o nella Scozia settentrionale. Si levò nelle strade tanto che gli uomini avrebbero quasi potuto annegarvi come in un mare di solida schiuma. E la gente del luogo mi disse che nulla di simile vi si era mai visto in tutte le memorie recenti, o forse nelle memorie di tutti i suoi quattromila anni.
Tutto ciò venne dopo; ma per me in quel momento, guardando la scena in modo così trasognato, parve semplicemente una conclusione drammatica al mio sogno. Non era che un accidente a confermare ciò che non era che un aspetto. Ma lo confermava con una strana e quasi soprannaturale compiutezza. La bianca luce fuori dalla finestra a settentrione posava su tutti i tetti e le torrette della città montana; poiché v’è un aspetto in cui la neve pare meno acqua gelata che luce solidificata. Come la neve si accumulava, si accumulavano anche dappertutto quei fantastici effetti del gelo che paiono accordarsi con le fantastiche qualità dell’architettura medievale; e che fanno parere un ghiacciolo la mera estensione di un gargoyle. Era l’atmosfera che ha indotto tanti romanzieri a fare della Parigi medievale un mero studio in bianco e nero di notte e neve. Qualcosa aveva ridisegnato in argento ogni cosa, dal rozzo ornamento sui vecchi portali alle rughe sugli antichi colli di Moab. Campi bianchi ancora screziati di verde scendevano nelle valli tra noi e i colli; e alta su di essi la Santa Città levava il capo nei cieli carichi di tuono, portando un bianco copricapo come una figlia dei Crociati.
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CHAPTER IV
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIGHT-SEEING
Various cultivated critics told me that I should find Jerusalem disappointing; and I fear it will disappoint them that I am not disappointed. Of the city as a city I shall try to say something elsewhere; but the things which these critics have especially in mind are at once more general and more internal. They concern something tawdry, squalid or superstitious about the shrines and those who use them. Now the mistake of critics is not that they criticise the world; it is that they never criticise themselves. They compare the alien with the ideal; but they do not at the same time compare themselves with the ideal; rather they identify themselves with the ideal. I have met a tourist who had seen the great Pyramid, and who told me that the Pyramid looked small. Believe me, the tourist looked much smaller. There is indeed another type of traveller, who is not at all small in the moral mental sense, who will confess such disappointments quite honestly, as a piece of realism about his own sensations. In that case he generally suffers from 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 that he did not think much of the Pyramid because it was not so tall as the Peak. I pointed out to him that he was really offering the tallest possible tribute to a work of man in comparing it to a mountain; even if he thought it was a rather small mountain. I suggested that it was a rather large tombstone. I appealed to those with whom I debated in that district, as to whether they would not be faintly surprised to find such a monument during their quiet rambles in a country churchyard. I asked whether each 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 realism applies 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 often when 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 room apparently 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 a couchant lion. If it was a real lion it would hardly be less arresting merely because it was near; nor could the first emotion of the traveller be adequately described as disappointment. In such cases there is generally some profit in looking at the monument a 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 can be 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 Sphinx that 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 face of the young Napoleon. Is it not barely possible, I hinted to 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 a greater matter than these dead things of the desert; in connection with a tomb to which even the Pyramids are but titanic lumber, and a presence greater than the Sphinx, since it is not only a riddle but 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 impressions of an ordinary tourist like myself, to whom much that is really full of an archaic strength may seem merely stiff, or much that really deals with a deep devotional psychology may seem merely distorted. In short I would put myself in the position of the educated Englishman who does quite honestly receive a mere impression of idolatry. Incidentally, I may remark, it is the educated Englishman who is the idolater. It is he who only reverences the place, and does not reverence the reverence for the place. It is he who is supremely concerned about whether a mere object is old or new, or whether a mere ornament is gold or gilt. In other words, it is he who values the visible things rather than the invisible; for no sane man can doubt that invisible things are vivid to the priests and pilgrims of these shrines.
In the midst of emotions that have moved the whole world out of its course, girt about with crowds who will die or do murder for a definition, the educated English gentleman in his blindness bows down to wood and stone. For the only thing wrong about that admirable man is that he is blind about himself.
No man will really attempt to describe his feelings, when he first stood at the gateway of the grave of Christ. The only record relevant here 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 are particularly fastidious. The guide who showed me the Sepulchre was not particularly noisy or profane or palpably mercenary; he was rather more than less sympathetic than the same sort of man who might have shown me Westminster Abbey or Stratford-on-Avon. He was 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 assumption that nobody else knew it. If there was anything to smile at, in associations so sacred, it was the elaborate simplicity with which he told the first facts of the Gospel story, as if he were evangelising a savage. Anyhow, he did not talk like a cheap-jack at a stall; but rather like a teacher in an infant school. He made it very clear that Jesus Christ was crucified in case any one should suppose he was beheaded; and often stopped in his narrative 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 reason whatever for doubting that he may have been a better man than I. I gave 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 monastic custodians of the shrines; but I see nothing surprising about that. I am not quite so ignorant as not to know that without the monastic brotherhoods, supported by such charity, there would not by this time be anything to see in Jerusalem at all. There was only one class 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 as grand as the men who made them. The incongruities there are, are those of local colour. In connection, by the way, with what I said about beasts of burden, I mounted a series of steep staircases to the roof of the convent beside the Holy Sepulchre. When I got to 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.
CAPITOLO IV
LA FILOSOFIA DEL VISITARE I LUOGHI
Vari critici colti mi dissero che avrei trovato Gerusalemme deludente; e temo li deluderà che io non sia deluso. Della città come città cercherò di dire qualcosa altrove; ma le cose che questi critici hanno soprattutto in mente sono al tempo stesso più generali e più intime. Esse riguardano qualcosa di pacchiano, squallido o superstizioso nei santuari e in coloro che li frequentano. Ora, l’errore dei critici non è che criticano il mondo; è che non criticano mai se stessi. Confrontano l’estraneo con l’ideale; ma non confrontano al tempo stesso se stessi con l’ideale; anzi, identificano se stessi con l’ideale. Ho incontrato un turista che aveva veduto la grande Piramide, e che mi disse che la Piramide sembrava piccola. Credetemi, il turista sembrava assai più piccolo. Vi è invero un altro tipo di viaggiatore, che non è affatto piccolo nel senso morale e mentale, il quale confessa simili delusioni con tutta onestà, come un frammento di realismo circa le proprie sensazioni. In tal caso egli soffre generalmente del difetto della maggior parte dei realisti: quello di non essere abbastanza realista. Non pensa davvero fino in fondo alle proprie impressioni; altrimenti scoprirebbe generalmente che, dopo tutto, non sono così deludenti. Un soldato spiritoso mi disse che veniva dal Derbyshire, e che non teneva in gran conto la Piramide perché non era alta quanto il Peak. Gli feci notare che stava in realtà offrendo il più alto tributo possibile a un’opera dell’uomo paragonandola a una montagna; anche se la riteneva una montagna piuttosto piccola. Suggerii che fosse una pietra tombale piuttosto grande. Mi appellai a coloro con cui discutevo in quella contrada, chiedendo se non sarebbero rimasti lievemente sorpresi di trovare un simile monumento durante le loro tranquille passeggiate in un cimitero di campagna. Chiesi se ciascuno di loro, avendo in famiglia una simile pietra tombale, non troverebbe naturale, benché quasi superfluo, additarla; e ciò con un certo orgoglio. Il medesimo principio del realismo superiore si applica a coloro che restano delusi alla vista de la Sfinge. La Sfinge supera davvero le aspettative perché sfugge alle aspettative. I monumenti appaiono comunemente imponenti quando sono alti e spesso quando sono lontani. La Sfinge è davvero inattesa, perché la si trova all’improvviso in un avvallamento, e innaturalmente vicina. Il suo volto è rivolto altrove; e l’effetto è raccapricciante come entrare in una stanza apparentemente vuota e trovarvi qualcuno immobile come i mobili. Oppure è come se si trovasse un leone accovacciato in quella buca nella sabbia; così come in effetti la parte sepolta del mostro ha la forma di un leone accovacciato. Se fosse un leone vero non sarebbe meno impressionante solo perché è vicino; né la prima emozione del viaggiatore potrebbe essere adeguatamente descritta come delusione. In tali casi vi è generalmente qualche profitto nel guardare il monumento una seconda volta, o persino le nostre stesse sensazioni una seconda volta. Così ragionavo, contendendo con critici selvaggi nel deserto; ma l’unica parte del dibattito che qui sia pertinente può esprimersi nell’affermazione che io ritengo la Piramide grande, per la profonda e semplice ragione che è più grande di me. Suggerii con delicatezza a coloro che erano delusi da la Sfinge che era appena possibile che la Sfinge fosse delusa da loro. La Sfinge ha veduto Giulio Cesare; con ogni probabilità ha veduto san Francesco, quando portò la sua fiammeggiante carità in Egitto; certamente ha contemplato, nei primi grandi giorni delle vittorie rivoluzionarie, il volto del giovane Napoleone. Non è forse appena possibile, insinuai ai miei amici e compagni di viaggio, che dopo tali esperienze essa possa restare un poco depressa alla vista di voi e di me? Ma, come dico, reintroduco le mie osservazioni soltanto in connessione con una questione più grande di queste cose morte del deserto; in connessione con una tomba rispetto alla quale persino le Piramidi non sono che titanico ciarpame, e con una presenza più grande de la Sfinge, poiché essa non è soltanto un enigma ma una risposta.
Prima di procedere a più profonde difese di un simile culto o di una simile cultura, desidero anzitutto annotare una sorta di prova per le prime impressioni di un turista comune come me, al quale molto di ciò che è davvero pieno di una forza arcaica può sembrare semplicemente rigido, o molto di ciò che davvero tratta di una profonda psicologia devozionale può sembrare semplicemente distorto. In breve, mi porrei nella posizione dell’inglese colto che riceve, con tutta onestà, una mera impressione di idolatria. Per inciso, posso osservare che è l’inglese colto a essere l’idolatra. È lui che riverisce soltanto il luogo, e non riverisce la riverenza per il luogo. È lui che si preoccupa supremamente se un mero oggetto sia antico o nuovo, o se un mero ornamento sia d’oro o dorato. In altre parole, è lui che apprezza le cose visibili anziché le invisibili; poiché nessun uomo sano di mente può dubitare che le cose invisibili siano vivide ai sacerdoti e ai pellegrini di questi santuari.
In mezzo a emozioni che hanno smosso il mondo intero dal suo corso, cinto da folle che moriranno o commetteranno omicidio per una definizione, il colto gentiluomo inglese, nella sua cecità, si prostra al legno e alla pietra. Poiché l’unica cosa che non va in quell’uomo ammirevole è che egli è cieco riguardo a se stesso.
Nessun uomo tenterà davvero di descrivere i propri sentimenti, quando per la prima volta si trovò alla soglia del sepolcro di Cristo. L’unica testimonianza qui pertinente è che non provai la reazione, per non dire la repulsione, che molti sembrano aver provato riguardo alla sua cornice formale.
O fui particolarmente fortunato, o altri sono particolarmente schizzinosi. La guida che mi mostrò il Sepolcro non era particolarmente chiassosa né profana né palesemente mercenaria; era piuttosto più che meno cordiale del medesimo genere d’uomo che avrebbe potuto mostrarmi l’Abbazia di Westminster o Stratford-on-Avon. Era un vecchietto piccolo, solenne, dall’aria di civetta, cattolico romano di religione; ma, ben lungi dal meritare l’accusa di non conoscere la Bibbia, meritava piuttosto una blanda rimostranza contro la sua supposizione che nessun altro la conoscesse. Se vi era qualcosa da sorridere, in associazioni tanto sacre, era l’elaborata semplicità con cui narrava i primi fatti della storia evangelica, come se stesse evangelizzando un selvaggio. In ogni caso, non parlava come un ciarlatano da bancarella; ma piuttosto come un maestro d’asilo. Rese assai chiaro che Gesù Cristo fu crocifisso, casomai qualcuno supponesse che fosse stato decapitato; e spesso si fermava nella narrazione per ripetere che l’eroe di questi eventi era Gesù Cristo, per timore che immaginassimo si trattasse di Nabucodonosor o del Duca di Wellington. Non mi dispiace affatto essere divertito da questo; ma non ho ragione alcuna di dubitare che egli possa essere stato un uomo migliore di me. Gli diedi quel che avrei dato a una guida simile nel mio paese; mi congedai da lui con la medesima cortesia con cui mi congederei da un mio connazionale. Diedi anche, naturalmente, del denaro, com’è consuetudine, ai vari custodi monastici dei santuari; ma non vi vedo nulla di sorprendente. Non sono così ignorante da non sapere che senza le confraternite monastiche, sostenute da tale carità, a quest’ora non vi sarebbe più nulla da vedere a Gerusalemme. Vi era una sola classe di uomini la cui costante premura fu di vegliare su queste cose, dall’età dei pagani e delle eresie all’età dei Turchi e dei turisti; e certamente non mi metterò a sogghignare contro di loro perché non compiono alcun lavoro pratico, per poi rifiutarmi di pagarli per il lavoro pratico che compiono. Del resto, persino lo scempio architettonico è esagerato: la chiesa fu incendiata e ricostruita in un periodo cattivo e moderno; ma le parti più antiche, specialmente il portico dei Crociati, sono grandi quanto gli uomini che le fecero. Le incongruenze che vi sono, sono quelle del colore locale. A proposito, in connessione con quel che dissi sulle bestie da soma, salii una serie di ripide scalinate fino al tetto del convento accanto al Santo Sepolcro. Giunto in cima, mi trovai nella placida presenza di due cammelli. Sarebbe curioso incontrare due mucche sul tetto di una chiesa di villaggio. Nondimeno, l’unica morale del capitolo qui interpolata è che possiamo incontrare cose altrettanto curiose nel nostro stesso paese.
When the critic says that Jerusalem is disappointing he generally means 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 is still 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 world of ideas, with what is weak in his own world of ideas. I will take an 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 that thorough-fare which Mr. Max Beerbohm, with his usual easy exactitude of 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 arts to the sort of people among whom I was brought up. It is also true that such a taste, in various forms and degrees, was fairly common in the world which may be symbolised as Kensington High Street. And whether or no it is a tribute, it is certainly a truth that most people with an artistic turn in Kensington High Street would have been very much shocked, in their sense of propriety, if they had seen the popular shrines of Jerusalem; the sham gold, the garish colours, the fantastic tales and the feverish tumult. But what I want such people to do, and what they never do, is to turn this truth round. I want them to imagine, not a Kensington aesthete walking down David Street to the Holy Sepulchre, but a Greek monk or a Russian pilgrim walking down Kensington High Street to Kensington Gardens. I will not insist here on all the hundred plagues of plutocracy that would really surprise such a Christian peasant; especially that curse of an irreligious society (unknown in religious societies, Moslem as well as Christian) the detestable denial of all dignity to 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 till his sight was blasted by a prodigy. He would either fall on his knees as before a shrine, or cover his face as from a sacrilege. He would have seen the Albert Memorial. There is nothing so conspicuous in Jerusalem. There is nothing so gilded and gaudy in Jerusalem. Above all, there is nothing in Jerusalem that is on so large a scale and at the same time in so gay and glittering a style. My simple Eastern Christian would almost certainly be driven to cry 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 prayers and heathen sacrifices of a lost humanity. I fancy he would feel a desire to be at home again amid the humble shrines of Zion. I really cannot imagine what he would feel, if he were told that the gilded idol was neither a god nor a demon, but a petty German prince who had some slight influence in turning us into the tools of Prussia.
Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens as something quite natural. I feel it so because I have been brought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at the graven images 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 of the 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 possibly a 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 might think about the Holy Sepulchre, do not think anything at all about the Albert Memorial. They are quite unconscious of how strange a thing it is; and that simply because they are used to it. The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their coloured background; and they are surely none the worse if they still feel rather more of the meaning of the colours. It may be said that they retain their childish illusion about their Albert Memorial. I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where a special curse was laid on those who can become like little children. And I never could understand why such critics who agree that the kingdom of heaven is for children, should forbid it to 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 much surprised at the place of tinsel in our lives as we are at its place in theirs. If we are critical of the petty things they do to glorify great things, they would find quite as much to criticise (as in Kensington 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 principle of self-criticism, as the necessary condition of all criticism. It applies quite as much, for instance, to the other great complaint which my Kensington friend would make after the complaint about paltry ornament; the complaint about what is commonly called backsheesh. Here again there is really something to complain of; though much of the fault is not due to Jerusalem, but rather to London and New York. The worst superstition of Jerusalem, like the worst profligacy of Paris, is a thing so much invented for Anglo-Saxons that it might be called an Anglo-Saxon institution. But here again the critic could only really judge fairly if he realised with what abuses at home he ought really to compare this particular abuse abroad. He ought to imagine, for example, the feelings of a religious Russian peasant if he really understood all the highly-coloured advertisements covering High Street Kensington Station. It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would 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 our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very 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 would really be a more unworthy sight than a scramble of poor guides; yet this is what would be conveyed by all the glare of gaudy advertisement to anybody who saw and understood it for the first time. Yet for us who are familiar with it all that gaudy advertisement fades into a background, just as the gaudy oriental patterns fade into a background for those oriental priests and pilgrims. Just as the innocent Kensington gentleman is wholly unaware that 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 are dark against the fainter and more fading gold in which are traced only the humbler haloes of the Twelve Apostles.
Quando il critico dice che Gerusalemme è deludente, egli intende in genere che il culto popolare vi è debole e degradato, e specialmente che l’arte religiosa vi è pacchiana e grottesca. Nella misura in cui vi è una qualche sorta di verità in ciò, resta pur vero che il critico raramente vede l’intera verità. Ciò che è sbagliato nel critico è che egli non critica sé stesso. Egli non paragona onestamente ciò che è debole, in questo particolare mondo di idee, con ciò che è debole nel proprio mondo di idee. Prenderò un esempio dalla mia esperienza personale, e in certo modo a mie spese. Se ho una brughiera natia, essa è certamente Kensington High Street, dalla quale si affaccia la casa della mia infanzia. Sono cresciuto in quella via maestra che il signor Max Beerbohm, con la sua consueta agevole esattezza di frase, ha descritto come «azzimata, con una propensione per le belle arti». Azzimato non fu forse mai un termine descrittivo per me stesso; ma è del tutto vero che debbo un certo gusto per le arti a quel genere di persone tra le quali fui allevato. È altresì vero che un tal gusto, in varie forme e gradi, era assai comune nel mondo che può essere simboleggiato come Kensington High Street. E, tributo o no, è certamente una verità che la maggior parte delle persone con un’inclinazione artistica a Kensington High Street sarebbero rimaste assai scandalizzate, nel loro senso della convenienza, se avessero visto i santuari popolari di Gerusalemme: l’oro finto, i colori sgargianti, i racconti fantastici e il tumulto febbrile. Ma ciò che voglio che tali persone facciano, e ciò che esse non fanno mai, è rovesciare questa verità. Voglio che immaginino, non un esteta di Kensington che scende per David Street verso il Santo Sepolcro, ma un monaco greco o un pellegrino russo che scende per Kensington High Street verso i Kensington Gardens. Non insisterò qui su tutte le cento piaghe della plutocrazia che davvero sorprenderebbero un tale contadino cristiano; specialmente quella maledizione di una società irreligiosa (ignota nelle società religiose, tanto musulmana quanto cristiana) che è la detestabile negazione di ogni dignità ai poveri. Non parlo ora di cose morali, ma di cose artistiche; delle arti e dei mestieri concreti usati nel culto popolare. Ebbene, il mio immaginario pellegrino camminerebbe oltre i Kensington Gardens finché la sua vista non fosse folgorata da un prodigio. Egli cadrebbe o in ginocchio come dinanzi a un santuario, o si coprirebbe il volto come per un sacrilegio. Avrebbe visto l’Albert Memorial. Non v’è nulla di così cospicuo a Gerusalemme. Non v’è nulla di così dorato e pacchiano a Gerusalemme. Soprattutto, non v’è nulla a Gerusalemme che sia in così grande scala e al medesimo tempo in uno stile così gaio e scintillante. Il mio semplice cristiano orientale sarebbe quasi certamente spinto a gridare ad alta voce: «A quale Dio sovrumano fu eretto questo enorme tempio? Spero che sia Cristo; ma temo che sia l’Anticristo». Tale, penserebbe egli, potrebbe ben essere la grande e aurea immagine del Principe di questo Mondo, innalzata in questo ampio spazio aperto per ricevere le preghiere pagane e i sacrifici pagani di un’umanità perduta. Immagino che egli proverebbe il desiderio di essere di nuovo a casa, tra gli umili santuari di Sion. Davvero non riesco a immaginare che cosa egli proverebbe, se gli venisse detto che l’idolo dorato non era né un dio né un demonio, ma un meschino principe tedesco che ebbe qualche lieve influenza nel trasformarci negli strumenti della Prussia.
Ora io stesso, lo ammetto di buon grado, sento quella enormità nei Kensington Gardens come qualcosa di del tutto naturale. La sento così perché sono stato allevato, per così dire, sotto la sua ombra; e ho fissato le immagini scolpite di Raffaello e Shakespeare quasi prima di conoscerne i nomi; e assai prima di scorgere alcunché di comico nel fatto che le loro figure fossero intagliate, in scala minore, sotto i piedi del Principe Alberto. Provai perfino un certo fanciullesco piacere nella doratura del baldacchino e della guglia, come nell’aureo palazzo di ciò che era, per Peter Pan e per tutti i bambini, qualcosa di un giardino fatato. Così i cristiani di Gerusalemme provano piacere, e forse un piacere fanciullesco, nella doratura di un palazzo migliore, accanto a un giardino più nobile, ornato con un intento alquanto più degno. Ma il punto è che la gente di Kensington, checché possa pensare del Santo Sepolcro, non pensa proprio nulla dell’Albert Memorial. Essi sono del tutto inconsapevoli di quanto strana cosa esso sia; e ciò semplicemente perché vi sono avvezzi. Anche i gruppi religiosi di Gerusalemme sono avvezzi al loro sfondo colorato; e non sono certo peggiori se sentono ancora un po’ di più il significato dei colori. Si potrà dire che essi conservano la loro fanciullesca illusione riguardo al loro Albert Memorial. Confesso che non riesco a considerare la Palestina come un luogo su cui fu posta una speciale maledizione contro coloro che possono divenire come piccoli fanciulli. E non ho mai potuto comprendere perché quei critici che convengono che il regno dei cieli è dei fanciulli debbano poi vietargli di essere l’unica specie di regno che i fanciulli davvero gradirebbero; un regno con vere corone d’oro o persino di orpello. Ma questa è un’altra questione, che discuterò in altro luogo; il punto è per il momento che tali persone resterebbero altrettanto sorprese dal posto dell’orpello nella nostra vita quanto noi lo siamo dal suo posto nella loro. Se noi siamo critici delle piccole cose che essi fanno per glorificare le cose grandi, essi troverebbero altrettanto da criticare (come nei Kensington Gardens) nelle grandi cose che noi facciamo per glorificare le cose piccole. E se noi ci meravigliamo del modo in cui essi paiono dorare il giglio, essi si meraviglierebbero altrettanto del modo in cui noi doriamo l’erbaccia.
Vi sono innumerevoli altri esempi, s’intende, di questo principio dell’autocritica, quale condizione necessaria di ogni critica. Esso si applica altrettanto, per esempio, all’altra grande lagnanza che il mio amico di Kensington farebbe dopo la lagnanza sull’ornamento meschino; la lagnanza su ciò che comunemente si chiama backsheesh. Anche qui vi è realmente qualcosa di cui lagnarsi; benché gran parte della colpa non spetti a Gerusalemme, ma piuttosto a Londra e a New York. La peggiore superstizione di Gerusalemme, come la peggiore dissolutezza di Parigi, è una cosa a tal punto inventata per gli anglosassoni che potrebbe essere chiamata un’istituzione anglosassone. Ma anche qui il critico potrebbe davvero giudicare con equità solo se si rendesse conto con quali abusi in patria dovrebbe realmente paragonare questo particolare abuso all’estero. Egli dovrebbe immaginare, per esempio, i sentimenti di un religioso contadino russo se davvero comprendesse tutte le pubblicità dai vivaci colori che ricoprono la stazione di High Street Kensington. Non è affatto così ripugnante vedere il povero che chiede denaro quanto vedere il ricco che chiede più denaro. E la pubblicità è il ricco che chiede più denaro. Un uomo si irriterebbe se si trovasse in una folla di milionari, tutti a tendere i loro cilindri di seta per un penny; o tutti a gridare a una sola voce: «Datemi denaro». Eppure la pubblicità davvero aggredisce l’occhio proprio come un tale grido aggredirebbe l’orecchio. «Gli stivali di Budge sono i migliori» significa semplicemente «Datemi denaro»; «Usate il Sapone Serafico» significa semplicemente «Datemi denaro». È un errore completo supporre che sia la gente comune a rendere volgari le nostre città, con cose sgradevoli come le pubblicità. La maggior parte di coloro le cui merci sono così affisse dappertutto sono gentiluomini assai facoltosi con corone comitali e tenute di campagna, uomini che probabilmente sono molto scrupolosi riguardo all’ornamento artistico delle proprie dimore. Essi deturpano le loro città allo scopo di decorare le loro case. Vedere tali uomini accalcarsi e schiamazzare per maggior ricchezza sarebbe davvero uno spettacolo più indegno di una zuffa di poveri guide; eppure è questo ciò che sarebbe trasmesso da tutto il bagliore della pubblicità pacchiana a chiunque lo vedesse e comprendesse per la prima volta. Eppure, per noi che vi siamo avvezzi, tutta quella pubblicità pacchiana sfuma in uno sfondo, proprio come i pacchiani motivi orientali sfumano in uno sfondo per quei sacerdoti e pellegrini orientali. Proprio come il innocente gentiluomo di Kensington è del tutto ignaro che il suo nero cilindro si staglia contro uno sfondo, o è cinto come da un’aureola, di un cartellone giallo che reclamizza senape, così la povera guida è talvolta ignara che le sue piccole azioni si stagliano scure contro l’oro più fioco e più sbiadito in cui sono tracciate soltanto le più umili aureole dei Dodici Apostoli.
But all these misunderstandings are merely convenient illustrations and introductions, leading up to the great fact of the main misunderstanding. It is a misunderstanding of the whole history and philosophy of the position; that is the whole of the story and the whole moral of the story. The critic of the Christianity of Jerusalem emphatically manages to miss the point. The lesson he ought to learn 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 gaudy as any advertisement of a soap; but one saint does not drive out another saint as one soap drives out another soap. They do not forget their recent idolatries, as the educated English are now trying to forget their very recent idolatry of everything German. These Christian bodies have been in Jerusalem for at least fifteen hundred years. Save for a few years after the time of Constantine and a few years after the First Crusade, they have been practically persecuted all the time. At least they have been under heathen masters whose attitude towards Christendom was hatred and whose type of government was despotism. No man living in the West can form the faintest conception of what it must have been to live in the very heart of the East through the long and seemingly everlasting epoch of Moslem power. A man in Jerusalem was in the centre of the Turkish Empire as a man in Rome was in the centre of the Roman Empire. The imperial power of Islam stretched away to the sunrise and the sunset; westward to the mountains of Spain and eastward towards the wall of China. It must have seemed as if the whole earth belonged to Mahomet to those who in this rocky city renewed their hopeless witness to Christ. What we have to ask ourselves is not whether we happen in all respects to agree with them, but whether we in the same condition 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 custom and how much a compromise even with custom; how much a thing made facile by 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 wild Eastern 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 would not be fighting for the Holy Fire or wrangling with beggars in the Holy Sepulchre. He would not be hanging fantastic lamps on a pillar peculiar to the Armenians, or peering into the 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 towards a more distant city; where, above the only formal and official open place in Jerusalem, the mighty mosaics of the Mosque of Omar proclaim 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 put to those who say that the Christianity of Jerusalem is degraded. After a thousand years of Turkish tyranny, the religion of a London fashionable preacher would not be degraded. It would be destroyed. It would not be there at all, to be jeered at by every prosperous tourist out of a train de luxe. It is worth while to pause upon the point; for nothing has been so wholly missed in our modern religious ideals as the ideal of tenacity. Fashion is called progress. Every new fashion is called a new faith. Every faith is a faith which offers everything except faithfulness. It was never so necessary to insist that most of the really vital and valuable ideas in the world, including Christianity, would never have survived at all if they had 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 progress and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all. Some think that this would be an improvement in itself. We have come to live morally, as the Japs live literally, in houses of paper. But they are pavilions made of the morning papers, which have to be burned on the appearance of the evening editions. Well, a thousand years hence the Japs may be ruling in Jerusalem; the modern Japs who no 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 yet ruled Jerusalem. But though we may think the Christian chapels as 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 of themselves but ourselves, the sights of Jerusalem also illustrate the 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 saintlier than 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 not notice the small things about it. They do not even discover what is interesting about their own disappointment. And similarly even those who are truly irritated by the unfamiliar fashions of worship in a place like Jerusalem, do not know how to discover what 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 ritual and 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 fact about such ornament of such places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as may really be counted unworthy of them. They would realise that what they would most instinctively reject as superstitious does not 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 not the harsh or ascetic decoration of a Spanish cloister; it is much more like the pompous yet frivolous decorations of a Parisian hotel. In short, in so far as the shrine has really been defaced it has not been defaced by the Dark Ages, but rather if anything by the Age of Reason. It is the enlightened eighteenth century, which regarded itself as the very noonday of natural culture and common sense, that has really though indirectly laid its disfiguring finger on the dark but dignified Byzantine temple. I do not particularly mind it myself; for in such great matters I do 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 it is 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 every freethinker of any artistic taste would think his temple far less artistically 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 permanent man-trap in the idea of being modern. So that the moral of this matter is the same as that of the other; that these things should raise in us, not merely the question of whether we like them, but of whether there is anything very infallible or imperishable about what we like. At least the essentials of these things endure; and if they seem to have remained fixed as effigies, at least they have not faded like fashion-plates.
Ma tutti questi malintesi non sono che comode illustrazioni e introduzioni, che conducono al gran fatto del malinteso principale. È un malinteso dell’intera storia e filosofia della situazione; e questo è tutto il racconto e tutta la morale del racconto. Il critico del Cristianesimo di Gerusalemme riesce con enfasi a mancare il punto. La lezione che dovrebbe apprenderne è quella di cui l’uomo occidentale e moderno ha più bisogno, e di cui non sa nemmeno di aver bisogno. È la lezione della costanza. Questa gente potrà decorare i propri templi con l’oro o con l’orpello; ma il loro orpello è durato più a lungo del nostro oro. Potranno costruire cose tanto costose e brutte quanto l’Albert Memorial; ma quella cosa resta un memoriale, una cosa di memoria immortale. Non lo costruiscono per una moda passeggera per poi dimenticarlo, o sforzarsi di dimenticarlo. Potranno dipingere l’immagine di un santo sgargiante come la réclame di un sapone; ma un santo non scaccia un altro santo come un sapone scaccia un altro sapone. Non dimenticano le loro recenti idolatrie, come gli inglesi colti tentano ora di dimenticare la loro recentissima idolatria di tutto ciò che è tedesco. Questi corpi cristiani sono a Gerusalemme da almeno millecinquecento anni. Salvo pochi anni dopo il tempo di Costantino e pochi anni dopo la Prima Crociata, sono stati praticamente perseguitati per tutto il tempo. Perlomeno sono stati sotto padroni pagani il cui atteggiamento verso la Cristianità era l’odio e il cui tipo di governo era il dispotismo. Nessun uomo che viva in Occidente può formarsi la più debole concezione di ciò che dev’essere stato vivere nel cuore stesso dell’Oriente attraverso la lunga e apparentemente eterna epoca del potere musulmano. Un uomo a Gerusalemme era al centro dell’Impero turco come un uomo a Roma era al centro dell’Impero romano. Il potere imperiale dell’Islam si estendeva fino al levante e al ponente; a ovest fino ai monti di Spagna e a est verso la muraglia della Cina. Doveva sembrare che l’intera terra appartenesse a Maometto a coloro che in questa rocciosa città rinnovavano la loro disperata testimonianza a Cristo. Ciò che dobbiamo chiederci non è se ci accada sotto ogni rispetto di essere d’accordo con loro, ma se noi, nella medesima condizione, avremmo persino il coraggio di essere d’accordo con noi stessi. Non è questione di quanta parte della loro religione sia superstizione, ma di quanta parte della nostra religione sia convenzione; quanto sia consuetudine e quanto un compromesso persino con la consuetudine; quanto una cosa resa facile dalla sicurezza della nostra stessa società o dal successo del nostro stesso stato. Questi sono sostegni potenti; e l’inglese illuminato, proveniente da una città con cattedrale o da una cappella suburbana, percorre questi selvaggi luoghi orientali con un certo senso di sicurezza e di stabilità. Anche dopo secoli di supremazia turca, un tal uomo sente che non sarebbe disceso a una simile credulità. Non starebbe combattendo per il Sacro Fuoco né litigando con i mendicanti nel Santo Sepolcro. Non appenderebbe fantastiche lampade a un pilastro proprio degli Armeni, né spierebbe dentro la gabbia dorata che racchiude la bruna Madonna dei Copti. Non sarebbe lo zimbello di simili favole degenerate; Dio non voglia. Non si prostrerebbe presso grotteschi altari; no davvero. Sarebbe molte centinaia di iarde più in là, inchinandosi con decoro verso una città più lontana; dove, sopra l’unico spiazzo formale e ufficiale di Gerusalemme, i possenti mosaici della Moschea di Omar proclamano attraverso le valli la vittoria e la gloria di Maometto.
Questa è la vera lezione che il viaggiatore illuminato dovrebbe apprendere; la lezione su se stesso. Questa è la prova che dovrebbe davvero essere posta a coloro che dicono che il Cristianesimo di Gerusalemme è degradato. Dopo mille anni di tirannia turca, la religione di un predicatore alla moda di Londra non sarebbe degradata. Sarebbe distrutta. Non ci sarebbe affatto, a farsi schernire da ogni prospero turista sceso da un train de luxe. Val la pena soffermarsi sul punto; poiché nulla è stato tanto completamente mancato nei nostri moderni ideali religiosi quanto l’ideale della tenacia. La moda viene chiamata progresso. Ogni nuova moda viene chiamata una nuova fede. Ogni fede è una fede che offre ogni cosa tranne la fedeltà. Non fu mai tanto necessario insistere sul fatto che la maggior parte delle idee davvero vitali e preziose del mondo, incluso il Cristianesimo, non sarebbero mai sopravvissute affatto se non fossero sopravvissute alla propria morte, anche nel senso del morire ogni giorno. L’ideale era fuori moda quasi dal primo giorno; ed è per questo che è eterno; poiché tutto ciò che è databile è condannato. Quanto alla nostra società, se procede al suo attuale ritmo di progresso e miglioramento, non ne resterà traccia né memoria alcuna. Alcuni pensano che ciò sarebbe di per sé un miglioramento. Siamo giunti a vivere moralmente, come i giapponesi vivono letteralmente, in case di carta. Ma sono padiglioni fatti dei giornali del mattino, che devono essere bruciati all’apparire delle edizioni della sera. Ebbene, di qui a mille anni i giapponesi potranno regnare a Gerusalemme; i moderni giapponesi che non vivono più in case di carta, ma in fabbriche sfruttatrici e in tuguri. Essi e i cinesi (popolo assai più dignitoso e democratico) sembrano essere circa gli unici popoli d’importanza che non abbiano ancora governato Gerusalemme. Ma per quanto possiamo giudicare le cappelle cristiane sottili come le case da tè giapponesi, esse saranno ancora cristiane; per quanto possiamo giudicare le sacre lampade a buon mercato come le lanterne cinesi, esse arderanno ancora dinanzi a un creatore del mondo crocifisso.
Ma oltre a questa necessità di fare degli strani culti la prova non di se stessi bensì di noi stessi, gli spettacoli di Gerusalemme illustrano anche l’altra osservazione sulla filosofia del visitare i luoghi. È vero, come ho suggerito, che dopo tutto la Sfinge è più grande di me; e per lo stesso principio i santi dipinti sono più santi di me, e i pazienti pellegrini più costanti di me. Ma è anche vero, come nella minor questione poc’anzi menzionata, che persino coloro i quali giudicano la Sfinge piccola generalmente non notano le piccole cose che la riguardano. Non scoprono nemmeno ciò che vi è d’interessante nella loro stessa delusione. E similmente persino coloro che sono davvero irritati dalle usanze insolite del culto in un luogo come Gerusalemme, non sanno come scoprire ciò che vi è d’interessante nell’esistenza stessa di ciò che li irrita. Per esempio, parlano di decadenza bizantina o di illusione barbarica, e generalmente se ne vanno con l’impressione che il rituale e il simbolismo siano qualcosa che risale ai Secoli Bui. Ma se davvero notassero i dettagli di ciò che li circonda, o anche delle proprie sensazioni, osserverebbero un fatto piuttosto curioso riguardo a tale ornamento di luoghi come la Chiesa del Santo Sepolcro, per quanto possa essere davvero ritenuto indegno di loro. Si accorgerebbero che ciò che più istintivamente rigetterebbero come superstizioso non risale a ciò che considererebbero come le età della superstizione. Vi sono realmente cattivi quadri, ma non sono quadri barbarici; sono quadri fioriti nell’ultimo sbiadito realismo del Rinascimento. Vi è realmente una decorazione rigida e sgraziata, ma non è la decorazione aspra o ascetica di un chiostro spagnolo; assomiglia molto più alle pompose eppur frivole decorazioni di un albergo parigino. In breve, per quanto il santuario sia stato realmente deturpato, non è stato deturpato dai Secoli Bui, ma piuttosto semmai dall’Età della Ragione. È l’illuminato secolo diciottesimo, che considerava se stesso come il pieno meriggio della cultura naturale e del buon senso, ad aver realmente, benché indirettamente, posato il suo dito deturpante sull’oscuro ma dignitoso tempio bizantino. Personalmente non me ne curo troppo; poiché in cose tanto grandi non credo che il gusto sia la prova. Ma se il gusto dev’essere fatto la prova, vi è in questo fatto materia per una momentanea riflessione; poiché è un altro esempio della debolezza di ciò che si può chiamare moda. Voltaire, credo, eresse una sorta di tempio a Dio nel proprio giardino; e possiamo star certi che fosse del gusto più squisito del tempo. Nulla lo avrebbe sorpreso di più che apprendere che, cinquant’anni dopo il successo della Rivoluzione francese, quasi ogni libero pensatore di qualche gusto artistico avrebbe giudicato il suo tempio assai meno ammirevole artisticamente del più vicino gargoyle di Notre Dame. Così è il progresso che va biasimato per la maggior parte di queste cose: e non dovremmo distoglierci con disprezzo da qualcosa di antiquato, ma piuttosto riconoscere con rispetto e persino con allarme una sorta di permanente trappola per uomini nell’idea di essere moderni. Sicché la morale di questa faccenda è la stessa dell’altra; che queste cose dovrebbero sollevare in noi non semplicemente la questione se ci piacciano, ma se vi sia qualcosa di molto infallibile o imperituro in ciò che ci piace. Almeno gli elementi essenziali di queste cose perdurano; e se sembrano essere rimasti fissi come effigi, almeno non sono sbiaditi come figurini di moda.
It has seemed worth while to insert here this note on the philosophy of sight-seeing, however dilatory or disproportionate it may seem. For I am particularly and positively convinced that unless these things can somehow or other be seen in the right historical perspective and 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 not worth seeing at all. Sight-seeing is a far more difficult and disputable matter than many seem to suppose; and a man refusing it altogether 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 far away across the luminous flats a faint triangular shape; the Pyramids. I could understand a man who had seen it turning his back and retracing his whole journey to his own country and his own home, saying, “I will go no 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 Jerusalem sitting 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 sense it is absurd to come at all. It is no more fantastic to turn back 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 has come for such a mood, he is not a fool to obey that mood. The way to 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 mood is in its nature moonshine. It may be said that this is especially true in the crowded and commonplace conditions in which most sight-seeing has to be done. It may be said that thirty tourists going together to see a tombstone is really as ridiculous as thirty poets going together to write poems about the nightingale. There would be something rather depressing about a crowd of travellers, walking over hill and dale after the celebrated cloud of Wordsworth; especially if the crowd is like the cloud, and moveth all together if it move at all. A vast mob assembled on 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 beforehand the 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 go in search of a surprise. To all of which there is only one answer; that such anticipation is absurd, and such realisation will be disappointing, that images will seem to be idols and idols will seem to be dolls, unless there be some rudiment of such a habit of mind as I have tried to suggest in this chapter. No great works will seem great, and no wonders of the world will seem wonderful, unless the angle from which they are seen is that of historical humility.
One more word may be added of a more practical sort. The place where the most passionate convictions on this planet are concentrated is not one 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 the Holy Fire bursts forth to declare that Christ is risen; and whether or 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 really does not expect. And whatever he may think about the philosophy of sight-seeing, it is not unlikely that he may see some sights.
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Mi è parso degno di nota inserire qui questa osservazione sulla filosofia del visitar luoghi, per quanto dilatoria o sproporzionata possa sembrare. Sono infatti particolarmente e positivamente convinto che, se queste cose non possano in un modo o nell’altro essere vedute nella giusta prospettiva storica e nella giusta proporzione filosofica, non valga affatto la pena di vederle. E lasciatemi dire, in conclusione, che non solo posso rispettare la sincerità, ma comprendere i sentimenti di un uomo che dica che non vale affatto la pena di vederle. Il visitar luoghi è faccenda assai più difficile e discutibile di quanto molti paiano supporre; e un uomo che vi rinunciasse del tutto potrebbe essere un uomo di senno e persino un uomo di immaginazione. Fu il grande Wordsworth a rifiutare di rivedere Yarrow; fu soltanto il piccolo Wordsworth a rivederla, dopo tutto. Ricordo il primo grande spettacolo al mio ingresso nel Vicino Oriente, quando per caso guardai fuori dal treno diretto al Cairo, e scorsi lontano, di là dalle luminose pianure, una debole forma triangolare: le Piramidi. Potrei comprendere un uomo che, avendola veduta, volgesse le spalle e rifacesse tutto il suo viaggio verso il proprio paese e la propria casa, dicendo: «Non andrò oltre; poiché ho veduto da lontano le ultime dimore dei re». Posso comprendere un uomo che, avendo soltanto scorto in lontananza Gerusalemme assisa sul colle, non andasse oltre e serbasse per sempre quella visione. Si direbbe, naturalmente, che fosse assurdo venire fin qui, per vedere così poco. Al che rispondo che, in quel senso, è assurdo venire affatto. Non è più fantastico tornare indietro per una simile fantasticheria di quanto lo fosse venire per una fantasticheria analoga. Un uomo non può mangiare le Piramidi; non può comprare o vendere la Città Santa; non vi può essere alcun aspetto pratico né del suo venire né del suo andare. Se non è venuto per uno stato d’animo poetico, è venuto per nulla; se è venuto per un tale stato d’animo, non è uno sciocco a obbedire a quello stato d’animo. Il modo per essere davvero uno sciocco è tentare di essere pratici sulle cose impratiche. È tentare di raccogliere le nuvole o di conservare il chiaro di luna come denaro. Ora, molto si può dire a favore dell’idea che cercare uno stato d’animo sia per sua natura chiaro di luna. Si può dire che ciò sia particolarmente vero nelle condizioni affollate e ordinarie in cui la maggior parte del visitar luoghi deve compiersi. Si può dire che trenta turisti che vadano insieme a vedere una lapide siano davvero tanto ridicoli quanto trenta poeti che vadano insieme a scrivere poesie sull’usignolo. Vi sarebbe qualcosa di piuttosto deprimente in una folla di viaggiatori che camminassero per colli e valli dietro la celebre nuvola di Wordsworth; specialmente se la folla è come la nuvola, e si muove tutta insieme se pur si muove. Una vasta calca radunata nella piana di Salisbury ad ascoltare l’allodola di Shelley probabilmente (dopo un’ora o due) la giudicherebbe una specie piuttosto sommessa di allodolare. Si può sostenere che sia altrettanto illogico sperare di fissare in anticipo gli effetti elusivi delle opere dell’uomo quanto di quelle della natura. Si può chiamare una contraddizione in termini l’aspettarsi l’inatteso. Si può stimare pura follia anticipare lo stupore, o andare in cerca di una sorpresa. A tutto ciò non vi è che una sola risposta: che una tale anticipazione è assurda, e una tale realizzazione sarà deludente, che le immagini sembreranno idoli e gli idoli sembreranno bambole, a meno che non vi sia qualche rudimento di quell’abito mentale che ho cercato di suggerire in questo capitolo. Nessuna grande opera sembrerà grande, e nessuna meraviglia del mondo sembrerà meravigliosa, a meno che l’angolo da cui è veduta non sia quello dell’umiltà storica.
Si può aggiungere ancora una parola di natura più pratica. Il luogo in cui si concentrano le convinzioni più appassionate di questo pianeta non è uno dove sarà sempre saggio, anche da un punto di vista politico, sfoggiare il nostro patronato plutocratico e la nostra scettica superiorità. Strane scene si sono già svolte intorno a quel tempio dove il Sacro Fuoco erompe a proclamare che Cristo è risorto; e, che riteniamo o no sacra la cosa, non vi è alcun dubbio che essa sia ignea. Che la persona superiore abbia o no ragione di aspettarsi l’inatteso, è possibile che le venga rivelato qualcosa che davvero non si aspetta. E qualunque cosa pensi della filosofia del visitar luoghi, non è improbabile che veda qualche spettacolo.
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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 justify all the Christmas cards. The cards that spangle Bethlehem with frost are generally regarded by the learned merely as vulgar lies. At best they are regarded as popular fictions, like that which made the shepherds in the Nativity Play talk a broad dialect of Somerset. In the deepest sense of course this democratic tradition is truer than most history. But even in the cruder and more concrete sense the tradition about the December snow is not quite so false as is suggested. It is not a mere local illusion for Englishmen to picture the Holy Child in a snowstorm, as it would be for the Londoners to 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 idea behind 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 West or the North. Snow is a rarity, but winter is a reality. Whether we regard it as the divine purpose of a mystery or the human purpose of a myth, the purpose of putting such a feast in winter would be just the same in Bethlehem as it would be in Balham. Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.
In other words, the semi-tropical nature of the place, like its vulgarity and desecration, can be, and are, enormously exaggerated. But it is always hard to correct the exaggeration without exaggerating the correction. It would be absurd seriously to deny that Jerusalem is an Eastern town; but we may say it was Westernised without being modernised. Anyhow, it was medievalised before it was modernised. And in the same way it would be absurd to deny that Jerusalem is a Southern town, in the sense of being normally out of the way of snowstorms, but the truth can be suggested by saying that it has always known the quality of snow, but not the quantity. And the quantity of snow that fell on this occasion would have been something striking and even sensational in Sussex or Kent. And yet another way of putting the proportions of the thing would be to say that Jerusalem has been besieged more often and by more different kinds of people than any town upon the globe; that it has been besieged by Jews and Assyrians, Egyptians and Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, Persians and Saracens, Frenchmen and Englishmen; but perhaps never before in all its agony of ages has it ever really been 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 have been in a state of famine. The railway failed between Jerusalem and the nearest station. The roads were impassable between Jerusalem 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 struck down as if by lightning. Even when the snow began at last to melt it only threatened to turn the besieged fortress into a sort of island. A river that men could not ford flowed between Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives. Even a man walking about the ordinary streets could easily step up to his knees or up to his waist. Snow stood about like a new system of natural barricades reared in some new type of revolution. I have already remarked that what struck me most about the city was the 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 than the city wall; and it turned the eyes of all spectators inwards. Above all, by its very abnormality it accentuated the normal divisions and differences of the place; and made it more possible to distinguish and describe them like dramatis personae. The parts they played in the crisis of the snow were very like the 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 sharply against that blank background of white.
The first fact of course was a fact of contrast. When I said that the city struck me in its historic aspect as being at least as much a memory of the Crusaders as of the Saracens, I did not of course mean to deny the incidental contrasts between this Southern civilisation and the civilisation of Europe, especially northern Europe. The immediate difference was obvious enough when the gold and the gaudy vegetation of so comparatively Asiatic a city were struck by this strange blast out of the North. It was a queer spectacle to 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 accustomed to live under such palm-trees bowed down under such unearthly storms. Yet the very manner in which they bore it is perhaps the first fact to be noted among all the facts that make up the puzzling problem of Jerusalem. Odd as it may sound you can see that the true Orientals are 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 the desert do not know the answer to the snow, it seems to them unanswerable. But Christians fight with snow in a double sense; they fight with snow as they fight with snowballs. A Moslem left to himself would no more play with a snowball than make a toy of a thunderbolt. And this is really a type of the true problem that was raised by the very presence of the English soldier in the street, even if he was only shovelling away the snow.
CAPITOLO V
LE STRADE DELLA CITTÀ
Quando Gerusalemme fu rimasta mezza sepolta nella neve per due o tre giorni, osservai a un amico che d’ora innanzi ero pronto a giustificare tutte le cartoline di Natale. Le cartoline che tempestano Betlemme di brina sono generalmente considerate dai dotti come mere menzogne volgari. Nel migliore dei casi vengono considerate come finzioni popolari, al pari di quella che faceva parlare i pastori del dramma della Natività in un largo dialetto del Somerset. Nel senso più profondo, s’intende, questa tradizione democratica è più vera di gran parte della storia. Ma anche nel senso più rozzo e concreto, la tradizione riguardo alla neve di dicembre non è tanto falsa quanto si suggerisce. Non è una mera illusione locale, per gli inglesi, raffigurarsi il Santo Bambino in una tempesta di neve, come lo sarebbe per i londinesi raffigurarselo in una nebbia di Londra. Vi può essere neve a Gerusalemme, e vi potrebbe essere neve a Betlemme; e quando penetriamo l’idea che sta dietro l’immagine, la troviamo non solo possibile ma probabile. In Palestina, almeno in queste parti montuose della Palestina, gli uomini hanno lo stesso sentimento generale riguardo alle stagioni che nell’Occidente o nel Nord. La neve è una rarità, ma l’inverno è una realtà. Che lo consideriamo come il proposito divino di un mistero o come il proposito umano di un mito, il proposito di collocare una tale festa nell’inverno sarebbe esattamente lo stesso a Betlemme quanto a Balham. Chiunque pensi al Santo Bambino come nato in dicembre intenderebbe con ciò esattamente quel che noi intendiamo con esso; che il Cristo non è soltanto un sole d’estate per i prosperi, ma un fuoco d’inverno per gli sventurati.
In altre parole, la natura semitropicale del luogo, come la sua volgarità e profanazione, può essere, ed è, enormemente esagerata. Ma è sempre difficile correggere l’esagerazione senza esagerare la correzione. Sarebbe assurdo negare seriamente che Gerusalemme sia una città orientale; ma possiamo dire che fu occidentalizzata senza essere modernizzata. Comunque, fu medievalizzata prima di essere modernizzata. E nello stesso modo sarebbe assurdo negare che Gerusalemme sia una città meridionale, nel senso di trovarsi normalmente fuori dal cammino delle tempeste di neve; ma la verità si può suggerire dicendo che essa ha sempre conosciuto la qualità della neve, ma non la quantità. E la quantità di neve che cadde in quest’occasione sarebbe stata qualcosa di sorprendente e persino di sensazionale nel Sussex o nel Kent. E un altro modo ancora di rendere le proporzioni della cosa sarebbe dire che Gerusalemme è stata assediata più spesso e da più diverse genti di qualsiasi altra città del globo; che è stata assediata da Ebrei e Assiri, Egiziani e Babilonesi, Greci e Romani, Persiani e Saraceni, Francesi e Inglesi; ma forse mai prima, in tutta la sua agonia di secoli, è stata davvero assediata dall’inverno. In questo caso non solo vi nevicò sopra, vi rimase sepolta dalla neve.
Per alcuni giorni la città fu realmente in stato d’assedio. Se la neve avesse tenuto per un numero sufficiente di giorni, avrebbe potuto trovarsi in stato di carestia. La ferrovia venne meno tra Gerusalemme e la stazione più vicina. Le strade erano impraticabili tra Gerusalemme e il villaggio più vicino, o persino il sobborgo più vicino. In alcuni luoghi la neve si accumulò abbastanza fonda da seppellire un uomo, e in alcuni luoghi, ahimè, seppellì davvero dei fanciulli; poveri piccoli arabi i cui corpi erano rigidi là dove erano caduti. Molti muli furono sopraffatti come da inondazioni, e innumerevoli alberi abbattuti come da un fulmine. Persino quando la neve cominciò infine a sciogliersi, minacciò soltanto di trasformare la fortezza assediata in una sorta d’isola. Un fiume che gli uomini non potevano guadare scorreva tra Gerusalemme e il Monte degli Ulivi. Persino un uomo che camminasse per le strade ordinarie poteva facilmente sprofondare fino alle ginocchia o fino alla cintola. La neve si ergeva come un nuovo sistema di barricate naturali innalzate in qualche nuovo tipo di rivoluzione. Ho già osservato che ciò che più mi colpì della città fu la muraglia della città; ma ora una nuova muraglia bianca stava tutt’intorno alla città; e una che né amico né nemico poteva varcare.
Ma uno stato d’assedio, quali che siano i suoi inconvenienti, è oltremodo comodo per un critico e osservatore della città. Concentrava tutta quell’impressione d’essere qualcosa di compatto e ciò che, con circostanze contingenti meno tragiche, si potrebbe dire accogliente. Fissava l’intero quadro in una cornice ancor più assoluta della muraglia della città; e volgeva gli occhi di tutti gli spettatori all’interno. Soprattutto, per la sua stessa anormalità, accentuava le normali divisioni e differenze del luogo; e rendeva più possibile distinguerle e descriverle come dramatis personae. Le parti che esse recitavano nella crisi della neve erano assai simili alle parti che recitavano nella crisi generale dello Stato. E il taglio stesso e il colore delle figure, turbante e tarbush, cachi e burnus e gabardina, sembravano risaltare più nitidamente contro quello sfondo bianco e vuoto.
Il primo fatto, s’intende, era un fatto di contrasto. Quando dissi che la città mi colpì, nel suo aspetto storico, come essendo almeno tanto un ricordo dei Crociati quanto dei Saraceni, non intendevo certo negare i contrasti incidentali fra questa civiltà meridionale e la civiltà d’Europa, specialmente dell’Europa settentrionale. La differenza immediata era abbastanza evidente quando l’oro e la sgargiante vegetazione di una città così comparativamente asiatica furono percossi da questo strano soffio venuto dal Nord. Era un curioso spettacolo vedere una grande palma verde piegata sotto un bianco carico di neve; ed era uno spettacolo più strano e più triste vedere le genti avvezze a vivere sotto tali palme piegate sotto tempeste così ultraterrene. Eppure il modo stesso in cui la sopportarono è forse il primo fatto da notare fra tutti i fatti che compongono lo sconcertante problema di Gerusalemme. Per quanto possa suonare strano, si può vedere che i veri orientali non hanno familiarità con la neve proprio per il fatto che l’accettano. La accettano come noi accetteremmo d’essere inghiottiti da un terremoto; perché non conosciamo la risposta a un terremoto. Gli uomini del deserto non conoscono la risposta alla neve, essa pare loro senza risposta. Ma i cristiani combattono con la neve in un duplice senso; combattono con la neve come combattono con le palle di neve. Un musulmano lasciato a se stesso non giocherebbe con una palla di neve più di quanto farebbe un giocattolo d’un fulmine. E questo è davvero un esempio del vero problema che veniva sollevato dalla stessa presenza del soldato inglese nella strada, anche se stava soltanto spalando via la neve.
It would be far from a bad thing, I fancy, if the rights and wrongs of these Bible countries could occasionally be translated into Bible language. And I suggest this here, not in the least because it is 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 be unfortunate if this only means coming in contact with Western pedantry and even Western hypocrisy. As it is there is only too much danger that the local complaints against the government may be exactly 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 refreshing finishing 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 be called scriptural English. It would be a very good thing for everybody concerned if any really unjust or unpopular official were described only in terms taken from the denunciations of Jezebel and Herod. It would especially be a good thing for the official. If it were true it would be appropriate, and if it were untrue it would be absurd. When people are really oppressed, their condition can generally be 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 they most certainly often do, then the condition of those more powerful persons can also be described in few and simple words; such as crime 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 confidence he has ever felt in his own leading articles. If an Arab comes to 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 really feel that he towers over me and my perishing industrial civilisation with a terrible appeal to eternal things. I feel he is a figure more 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 solidarity as it functions for international reconstruction,” and so on, why then I must confess to the weakness of feeling my sympathies instantly and strangely chilled. I merely feel inclined to tell him that I can talk that sort of pidgin English better than he can. If he modelled himself on the great rebels and revolutionists of the Bible, it would at least be a considerable improvement in his literary style. But as a matter of fact something much more solid is involved than literary style. There is a logic and justice in the distinction, even in the world of ideas. That most people with much more education than the Arab, and therefore much less excuse than the Arab, entirely ignore that distinction, is merely a result of their ignoring ideas, and being satisfied with 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 such government as is self-made. They are not necessarily entitled to a special and elaborate machinery that somebody else has made. It is their right to make it for themselves, but it is also their duty to think of it for themselves. Self-government of a simple kind has existed in numberless simple societies, and I shall always 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 complicated societies 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 inventions and 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 is rather 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 presence of the snow in Palestine, especially in the light of the old proverb about 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 things no European has the right to do, is much sharper and clearer than the confusions of verbosity. On the one hand the things the 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 curiously enough the wrongs seem to me more real than the complaints. The real case against our Egyptian adventure was stated long ago by Randolph Churchill, when he denounced “a bondholder’s war”; it is in 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 mean the 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 there is no doubt that Jerusalem is a city, and the nations have come to its light.
Non sarebbe affatto una cattiva cosa, credo, se le ragioni e i torti di questi paesi della Bibbia potessero di tanto in tanto essere tradotti nel linguaggio della Bibbia. E lo suggerisco qui, non certo perché sia un linguaggio religioso, ma semplicemente perché è un linguaggio semplice. Può essere una buona cosa, e per molti versi lo è di certo, che i popoli nativi del Vicino Oriente, dell’Egitto o dell’Arabia, entrino in contatto con la cultura occidentale; ma sarà un peccato se ciò significherà soltanto entrare in contatto con la pedanteria occidentale e persino con l’ipocrisia occidentale. Così com’è, vi è fin troppo pericolo che le lagnanze locali contro il governo siano esattamente simili alle spiegazioni ufficiali del governo; vale a dire, meri filari di paroloni con ben poco significato in gioco. In breve, se le genti devono imparare a parlare inglese, sarà un ristoratore tocco finale alla loro cultura che imparino a parlare un inglese schietto. Di questo sarebbe difficile trovare un modello operativo migliore di quello che si potrebbe chiamare l’inglese scritturale. Sarebbe un’ottima cosa per tutti gli interessati se ogni funzionario davvero ingiusto o impopolare venisse descritto soltanto con termini tratti dalle denunce di Jezabel ed Erode. Sarebbe in special modo una buona cosa per il funzionario. Se fosse vero sarebbe appropriato, e se fosse falso sarebbe assurdo. Quando le genti sono davvero oppresse, la loro condizione può in genere essere descritta con termini assai semplici legati a cose assai semplici; con il pane, con la terra, con le tasse e i figli e le chiese. Se imperialisti e capitalisti così li opprimono, come di certo assai spesso fanno, allora anche la condizione di quelle persone più potenti può essere descritta con parole poche e semplici; quali delitto e peccato e morte e inferno. Ma quando le lagnanze vengono avanzate, come talora accade in Palestina e ancor più in Egitto, nello stile elaborato e prolisso di un articolo di fondo, l’europeo ben disposto è incline a ricordare quanta poca fiducia egli abbia mai riposto nei propri articoli di fondo. Se un arabo viene da me e dice: «Lo straniero d’oltremare mi ha tassato, e ha preso i covoni di grano dal campo dei miei padri», sento davvero che egli mi sovrasta, me e la mia peritura civiltà industriale, con un terribile appello alle cose eterne. Sento che egli è una figura più duratura di una statua, come la figura di Nabot o di Natan. Ma quando quel semplice figlio del deserto apre bocca e dice: «L’autodeterminazione della solidarietà proletaria consapevole di classe in quanto funziona per la ricostruzione internazionale», e così via, ebbene allora devo confessare la debolezza di sentire le mie simpatie istantaneamente e stranamente raffreddate. Mi sento semplicemente incline a dirgli che io so parlare quella sorta di inglese pidgin meglio di lui. Se egli si modellasse sui grandi ribelli e rivoluzionari della Bibbia, sarebbe perlomeno un notevole miglioramento del suo stile letterario. Ma in realtà è in gioco qualcosa di ben più solido dello stile letterario. Vi è una logica e una giustizia nella distinzione, persino nel mondo delle idee. Che la maggior parte delle persone con assai più istruzione dell’arabo, e perciò assai meno scuse dell’arabo, ignorino del tutto quella distinzione, è semplicemente il risultato del loro ignorare le idee, e dell’accontentarsi di paroloni. Essi amano la democrazia perché è un parolone; è l’unica cosa che di essa amano.
Le genti hanno diritto all’autogoverno; vale a dire, a quel governo che sia autoprodotto. Non hanno necessariamente diritto a un macchinario speciale ed elaborato che qualcun altro ha costruito. È loro diritto costruirlo da sé, ma è anche loro dovere pensarlo da sé. L’autogoverno di tipo semplice è esistito in innumerevoli società semplici, e riterrò sempre un’orribile responsabilità interferire con esso. Ma il governo rappresentativo, o teoricamente rappresentativo, di tipo estremamente complicato, può esistere in certe società complicate senza che esse siano tenute a trasferirlo ad altri, né tantomeno ad ammirarlo per sé stesse. In ogni caso, nel bene o nel male, lo hanno inventato esse stesse. E vi è una distinzione morale, perfettamente razionale e democratica, tra tali invenzioni e i diritti autoevidenti che nessun uomo può pretendere di aver inventato. Se l’arabo mi dice: «Non m’importa un accidente dell’Europa; io esigo pane», il rimprovero è per me al contempo vero e terribile. Ma se dice: «Non m’importa un accidente dell’Europa; io esigo cucina francese, dolciumi italiani, l’audit ale inglese», e così via, penso che sia piuttosto un arabo irragionevole. Dopotutto, siamo stati noi a inventare queste cose; in auctore auctoritas.
E di questo problema vi è una sorta di modello operativo nella presenza della neve in Palestina, specie alla luce dell’antico proverbio sull’impossibilità della neve in Egitto. La Palestina è più selvaggia, meno ricca e modernizzata, più religiosa e perciò più realistica. Il contrasto tra le cose che solo un europeo può fare, e le cose che nessun europeo ha il diritto di fare, è assai più netto e chiaro delle confusioni della verbosità. Da un lato le cose che gli inglesi possono fare sono cose più reali, come lo sgombrare via la neve; proprio per la ragione che qui gli inglesi non stanno, per così dire, costruendo su un selciato francese ma sulle nude rocce delle terre selvagge d’Oriente, il contatto con l’Islam e Israele è più semplice e diretto. E dall’altro lato i malcontenti e le rivolte sono più reali. Ben lungi dal voler suggerire che gli egiziani non abbiano lagnanze, sono ben lontano dall’intendere che non abbiano torti subiti. Ma, curiosamente, i torti mi sembrano più reali delle lagnanze. Il vero atto d’accusa contro la nostra avventura egiziana fu formulato molto tempo fa da Randolph Churchill, quando denunciò «una guerra degli obbligazionisti»; sta in tutta la faccenda della riscossione dei debiti dovuti alla finanza cosmopolita. Ma un forestiero in Egitto ode poca denuncia della finanza cosmopolita, e gran copia di scempiaggini in fatto di idealismo cosmopolita. Quando i palestinesi dicono che gli usurai minacciano la loro terra intendono la terra che essi zappano; una vecchia realtà e non una nuova astrazione. La loro rivolta può essere giusta o sbagliata, ma è reale; e ciò che vale per la loro rivolta vale per la loro religione. Vi possono ben essere dubbi sul fatto che l’Egitto sia una nazione, ma non vi è alcun dubbio che Gerusalemme sia una città, e le nazioni sono venute alla sua luce.
The problem of the snow proved indeed the text for a tale touching the practical politics of the city. The English soldiers cleared the snow away; the Arabs sat down satisfied or stoical with the snow blocking their own doors or loading their own roofs. But the Jews, as the story went, were at length persuaded to clear away the snow in front of them, and then demanded a handsome salary 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 they are 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 they are in the old sense money-grabbers, but rather in the new sense money-grabbers (as an enemy would put it) men sincerely and 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 remain idle capitalists, but because they insist on being properly paid proletarians. With all this I shall deal, however, when I treat of the Jewish problem itself. The point for the moment is that the episode of the snow did in a superficial way suggest the 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 worst consequences of the calamity. Probably they sometimes save the inhabitants from something which the inhabitants do not regard as a calamity. It is the danger of all such foreign efficiency 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 it suggests 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 their political 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 political subtlety 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 commemorated in 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 blessing to two canons. The bishop had indeed recently appointed two canons to the service of the Church, but he had not secreted them under the floor of the chancel. There was another agreeable incident when the Turkish authorities, by an impulsive movement of religious toleration, sent for a Greek priest to bury Greek soldiers, and told him to 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 comedy is the perpetual social introduction to solid and smiling citizens who have been nearly hanged by the Turks. The fortunate gentleman seems still to be regarding his escape with a broad grin. If you were introduced to a polite Frenchman who had come straight from the guillotine, or to an affable American who had only just vacated the electrical chair, you would feel a faint curiosity about 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 mind and perhaps your lips would faintly form the syllables “What for?” But evidently, under Turkish rule, being hanged was like being knocked down by a cab; it might happen to anybody. This is a parenthesis, since I am only dealing here with the superficial experience of the streets, especially in the snow. But it will be well to safeguard it by saying that this unpolitical carelessness and comprehensiveness of the indiscriminate Turk had its tragic as well as its comic side. It was by no means everybody that escaped hanging; and there was a tree growing outside the Jaffa Gate at which men might still shudder as they pass it in the sunlight. It was what a modern revolutionary poet has called bitterly the Tree of Man’s Making; and what a medieval revolutionary poet called the 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 about the Moslem fatalism which seems so alien to political actuality. There was a popular legend or proverb that this terrible tree was in some way bound up with the power of the Turk, and perhaps the Moslem over a great part of the earth. There is nothing more strange about that Moslem fatalism than a certain gloomy magnanimity which can invoke omens and oracles against itself. It is astonishing how often the Turks seem to have accepted a legend or prophecy about their own ultimate failure. De Quincey mentions one of them in the blow that half broke the Palladium of Byzantium. It is said that the Moslems themselves predict the entry of 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 accepting the popular prophecy which declared that so long as it stood the Turkish Empire would stand. It was as if the wicked man of Scripture had daily watered a green bay-tree, to make sure that it should flourish.
Il problema della neve si rivelò in effetti lo spunto per un racconto che toccava la politica pratica della città. I soldati inglesi spalarono via la neve; gli arabi sedettero soddisfatti o stoici mentre la neve ostruiva le loro porte o gravava sui loro tetti. Ma gli ebrei, come voleva la storia, furono alla fine persuasi a sgomberare la neve davanti a loro, e allora reclamarono un lauto compenso per aver ripristinato l’uso delle proprie porte di casa. La storia non è del tutto giusta; eppure non è così ingiusta come sembra. Qualunque antisemita ragionevole converrà che simili racconti, anche quando sono veri, non sempre denotano una tradizione avara nel semitismo, ma talvolta il più sano e più umano richiamo del bolscevismo. Gli ebrei pretendono davvero salari alti, ma non sempre perché siano, nel vecchio senso, degli arraffasoldi, bensì piuttosto, nel nuovo senso, degli arraffasoldi (come direbbe un nemico) uomini sinceramente e amaramente convinti del proprio diritto al plusvalore del capitalismo. Lo stesso problema si presenta nelle colonie ebraiche dei distretti rurali; nella spiegazione ebraica dell’impiego di manodopera araba e siriana. Gli ebrei sostengono che ciò avviene non perché desiderino restare capitalisti oziosi, ma perché insistono nell’essere proletari adeguatamente pagati. Di tutto ciò tratterò, tuttavia, quando affronterò il problema ebraico in sé. Il punto, per il momento, è che l’episodio della neve suggeriva, in modo superficiale, le parti recitate dalle tre fazioni e i racconti che si narravano su di esse. Anzitutto, è giusto dire che gli inglesi fanno moltissime cose, come sgomberare la neve, semplicemente perché nessun altro le farebbe. Essi salvarono davvero gli abitanti orientali da alcune delle peggiori conseguenze della calamità. Probabilmente talvolta salvano gli abitanti da qualcosa che gli abitanti non considerano affatto una calamità. È il pericolo di ogni simile efficienza straniera che essa spesso salva uomini che non desiderano essere salvati. Ma in molti casi essi fanno cose di cui i musulmani traggono profitto, ma che i musulmani da soli non proporrebbero, né tantomeno compirebbero. E questo ha un significato generale perfino nella nostra prima ricognizione, poiché suggerisce una verità facile da abusare, ma credo impossibile da ignorare. Intendo che c’è qualcosa di non-politico nella moralità musulmana. Per quanto perverso possa apparire, sospetto che la maggior parte dei loro movimenti politici derivi dalla loro moralità non-politica. Diventano politici perché sanno di non essere politici; e sentono che la loro vita semplice e più o meno sana è in svantaggio, di fronte alla supremazia politica degli inglesi e alla sottigliezza politica degli ebrei.
Per esempio, la tradizione del dominio turco è semplicemente uno scherzo. Tutte le storie a suo riguardo sono scherzi, e spesso ottimi scherzi. Il mio episodio prediletto è quello ancora commemorato nella cattedrale inglese da un enorme buco nel pavimento. I turchi divelsero il pavimento in cerca di artiglieria inglese nascosta; perché era stato loro detto che il vescovo aveva impartito la sua benedizione a due canonici. Il vescovo aveva in effetti da poco nominato due canonici al servizio della Chiesa, ma non li aveva occultati sotto il pavimento del presbiterio. Vi fu un altro piacevole episodio quando le autorità turche, per un impulsivo slancio di tolleranza religiosa, mandarono a chiamare un prete greco perché seppellisse soldati greci, e gli dissero di scegliere a suo piacimento in un mucchio di cadaveri di ogni fede e colore. Ma insieme il più curioso e il più comune tocco di commedia è la perpetua presentazione mondana a solidi e sorridenti cittadini che sono stati quasi impiccati dai turchi. Il fortunato gentiluomo sembra ancora contemplare il suo scampato pericolo con un largo sogghigno. Se vi presentassero un cortese francese appena giunto dalla ghigliottina, o un affabile americano che aveva appena lasciato la sedia elettrica, provereste una lieve curiosità sull’intera vicenda. Se un amico ve ne presentasse qualcuno dicendo: «Il mio amico Robinson; la sua condanna è stata commutata in lavori forzati», oppure «Mio zio William, appena tornato dal carcere di Dartmoor», la vostra mente e forse le vostre labbra formerebbero fiocamente le sillabe: «E per cosa?». Ma evidentemente, sotto il dominio turco, essere impiccati era come essere investiti da una carrozza; poteva capitare a chiunque. Questa è una parentesi, giacché qui mi occupo soltanto dell’esperienza superficiale delle strade, specialmente nella neve. Ma sarà bene premunirsi dicendo che questa apolitica noncuranza e onnicomprensività dell’indiscriminato turco ebbe il suo lato tragico così come il suo lato comico. Non era affatto chiunque a scampare all’impiccagione; e cresceva un albero fuori dalla Porta di Giaffa dinanzi al quale gli uomini potevano ancora rabbrividire passandovi accanto alla luce del sole. Era ciò che un moderno poeta rivoluzionario ha amaramente chiamato l’Albero fatto dalla mano dell’Uomo; e ciò che un poeta rivoluzionario medievale chiamò l’albero da frutto nel frutteto del re. Era la forca; e delle vite ne sono cadute come foglie da un albero in autunno. Eppure anche sul versante più severo possiamo rintracciare la verità intorno al fatalismo musulmano che appare così estraneo alla realtà politica. Correva una leggenda o un proverbio popolare secondo cui questo albero terribile era in qualche modo legato al potere del turco, e forse del musulmano su gran parte della terra. Non c’è nulla di più strano in quel fatalismo musulmano di una certa cupa magnanimità capace di invocare presagi e oracoli contro se stessa. È sorprendente quanto spesso i turchi sembrino aver accettato una leggenda o una profezia sul proprio definitivo fallimento. De Quincey ne menziona una nel colpo che spezzò a metà il Palladio di Bisanzio. Si dice che gli stessi musulmani predìcano l’ingresso di un re cristiano di Gerusalemme attraverso la Porta d’Oro. Forse è per questo che hanno murato la porta fatale; ma in ogni caso trattarono in quel modo l’albero fatale. Lo legarono e rivettarono elaboratamente con il ferro, come accettando la profezia popolare che dichiarava che, finché esso fosse rimasto in piedi, l’Impero turco sarebbe rimasto in piedi. Era come se l’empio della Scrittura avesse quotidianamente annaffiato un verde alloro, per assicurarsi che prosperasse.
In the last chapter I have attempted to suggest a background of the battlemented walls with the low gates and narrow windows which seem to relieve the liveliest of the coloured groups against the neutral tints of the North, and how this was intensified when the neutral tints were touched with the positive hue of snow. In the same merely impressionist spirit I would here attempt to sketch some of the externals of the actors in such a scene, though it is hard to do justice to such a picture even in the superficial matter of 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 most striking 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 blue that is Reckitt’s blue; the red is sure to have the enrichment of 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 be called aesthetic; and it is a nameless instinct that preserves these nameless tints. Like all such instincts, it can be blunted by a bullying rationalism; like all such children, these people do not know why they prefer the better, and can therefore 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 something like a chill to the blood when he first saw the black figures of the veiled Moslem women, sinister figures without faces. It is as if in that world every woman were a widow. When he realised that these were not the masked mutes at a very grisly funeral, but merely ladies literally obeying a convention of wearing veils 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 want five 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 woman of Bethlehem, is almost certainly a finer thing than the more coquettish 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 will soon feel in Jerusalem, if he has come from these more commercial cities of the East; a spiritual tone decidedly more delicate and dignified, like the clear air about the mountain city. Whatever the human vices involved, it is not altogether for nothing that this is the holy town of three great religions. When all is said, he will feel that there are some tricks that could not be played, some trades that could not be plied, some shops that could not be opened, within a stone’s throw of the Sepulchre. This indefinable seriousness has its own fantasies of fanaticism or 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 worn on each side of the face, like something between curls and whiskers. Sometimes they look strangely effeminate, like some rococo burlesque 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 often made to match. But though they may be ugly, or even horrible, they are not vulgar like the Jews at Brighton; they trail behind them too many primeval traditions and laborious loyalties, along with their grand though often greasy robes of bronze or purple velvet. They often wear on their heads that odd turban of fur worn by the Rabbis in the pictures of Rembrandt. And indeed that great name is not irrelevant; for the whole truth at the back of Zionism is in the difference between the picture of 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 world of the artist, who drew a Rabbi as he would a Brahmin. But Sargent had 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 on the strange hairy haloes that can still be seen on the shaven heads of the Jews of Jerusalem. And I should be sorry for any pogrom that brought down any of their grey wisps or whiskers in sorrow to the grave.
The whole scene indeed, seriousness apart, might be regarded as a fantasia for barbers; for the different ways of dressing the hair would alone serve as symbols of different races and religions. Thus the Greek priests of the Orthodox Church, bearded and robed in black with black towers upon their heads, have for some strange reason their hair bound up behind like a woman’s. In any case they have in their pomp a touch of the bearded bulls of Assyrian sculpture; and this strange fashion of curling if not oiling the Assyrian bull gives the newcomer an indescribable and illogical impression of the unnatural sublimity of archaic art. In the Apocalypse somewhere there is an inspiringly unintelligible allusion to men coming on the earth, whose hair is like the hair of women and their teeth like the teeth of lions. I have never been bitten by an Orthodox clergyman, and cannot say whether his teeth are at all leonine; though I have seen seven of them together enjoying their lunch at an hotel with decorum and dispatch. But the twisting of the hair in the womanish fashion does for us touch that note of the abnormal which the mystic meant to convey in 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 did not carry this curious coiffure, exclaimed, in a tone of heartrending surprise and distress, “Oh, he’s bobbed his hair!”
Nell’ultimo capitolo ho tentato di suggerire uno sfondo di mura merlate, con le basse porte e le strette finestre che sembrano far risaltare i più vivaci dei gruppi variopinti contro le tinte neutre del Nord, e come ciò fosse accentuato quando le tinte neutre venivano toccate dalla positiva sfumatura della neve. Nel medesimo spirito puramente impressionistico vorrei qui tentare di abbozzare alcuni degli aspetti esteriori degli attori di una tale scena, per quanto sia arduo rendere giustizia a un simile quadro anche nella superficiale questione del pittoresco. Anzi, è difficile essere sufficientemente superficiali; giacché in Oriente quasi ogni aspetto esteriore è un simbolo. La maggior parte di essa è lo sgargiante cumulo di stracci dell’umanità araba, e persino su di esso si potrebbe tenere una conferenza su quasi ogni straccio colorato. Molto si sente parlare dei colori vistosi dell’Oriente; ma la cosa più sorprendente che li riguarda è che sono colori delicati. È raro vedere un rosso che sia semplicemente come una cassetta delle lettere, o un azzurro che sia l’azzurro di Reckitt; il rosso è certo di avere l’arricchimento del vino fulvo o delle arance sanguigne, e l’azzurro dei pavoni o del mare. In breve questa gente è artistica nel senso che un tempo si soleva chiamare estetico; ed è un istinto senza nome a preservare queste tinte senza nome. Come tutti gli istinti di tal genere, esso può essere smussato da un razionalismo prepotente; come tutti i fanciulli di tal genere, questa gente non sa perché preferisca il meglio, e può quindi essere persuasa dai sofisti di preferire il peggio. Ma vi sono altri elementi che emergono dalla folla variopinta, più significativi, e perciò più ostinati. Uno straniero del tutto ignaro di quel mondo proverebbe qualcosa come un gelo nel sangue quando scorgesse per la prima volta le nere figure delle donne musulmane velate, sinistre figure senza volto. È come se in quel mondo ogni donna fosse una vedova. Quando si accorgesse che queste non erano i muti mascherati di un funerale assai macabro, ma semplicemente signore che alla lettera obbedivano a una convenzione di portare il velo in pubblico, avrebbe probabilmente una reazione di riso. Sarebbe disposto a dire con leggerezza che dev’essere una vita tediosa, non solo per le donne ma anche per gli uomini; e che un uomo ben potrebbe volere cinque mogli se dovesse sposarle prima ancora di poterle guardare. Ma farà bene a non accontentarsi di simile leggerezza, poiché il velamento completo delle donne musulmane di Gerusalemme, per quanto non sia cosa più nobile della libertà della donna cristiana di Betlemme, è quasi certamente cosa più nobile del più civettuolo compromesso delle altre donne musulmane del Cairo. Significa semplicemente che la religione musulmana è qui osservata più sinceramente; e ciò a sua volta è parte di qualcosa che una persona sensibile presto avvertirà a Gerusalemme, se sia giunta da queste più commerciali città dell’Oriente; un tono spirituale decisamente più delicato e dignitoso, come l’aria limpida attorno alla città montana. Quali che siano i vizi umani implicati, non è del tutto invano che questa sia la città santa di tre grandi religioni. Detto tutto, egli sentirà che vi sono certi inganni che non si potrebbero perpetrare, certi mestieri che non si potrebbero esercitare, certe botteghe che non si potrebbero aprire, a un tiro di sasso dal Sepolcro. Questa indefinibile serietà ha le proprie fantasie di fanatismo o di formalismo; ma se questi sono vizi, non sono volgarità. Non vi è esempio più forte di ciò dei veri Ebrei di Gerusalemme, specialmente quelli provenienti dai ghetti dell’Europa orientale. Li si può individuare immediatamente per i peculiari ciuffi di capelli portati ai due lati del volto, come qualcosa a metà tra riccioli e basette. Talvolta appaiono stranamente effeminati, come una qualche burlesca parodia rococò dei boccoli di una donna della prima età vittoriana. Talvolta somigliano assai più alle corna di un diavolo; e non occorre essere antisemiti per dire che il volto è spesso fatto per intonarsi. Ma per quanto possano essere brutti, o persino orribili, non sono volgari come gli Ebrei di Brighton; si trascinano dietro troppe primeve tradizioni e laboriose fedeltà, insieme alle loro magnifiche benché spesso unte vesti di velluto bronzeo o purpureo. Spesso portano sul capo quello strano turbante di pelliccia indossato dai Rabbini nei dipinti di Rembrandt. E in verità quel grande nome non è irrilevante; poiché l’intera verità che sta dietro il Sionismo consiste nella differenza tra un ritratto di Ebreo di Rembrandt e un ritratto di Ebreo di Sargent. Per Rembrandt il Rabbino era, in un senso speciale e duplice, una figura distinta. Egli era qualcosa di distinto dal mondo dell’artista, che disegnava un Rabbino come avrebbe disegnato un Bramino. Ma Sargent doveva trattare i suoi modelli come solidi cittadini d’Inghilterra o d’America; e di conseguenza i suoi quadri sono dirette provocazioni a un pogrom. Ma la luce che Rembrandt amava cade non irriverente sulle strane aureole pelose che si possono ancora scorgere sui capi rasati degli Ebrei di Gerusalemme. E sarei addolorato per qualsiasi pogrom che facesse scendere alcuno dei loro grigi ciuffi o basette, nel dolore, nella tomba.
L’intera scena, invero, serietà a parte, potrebbe essere considerata una fantasia per barbieri; giacché i diversi modi di acconciare i capelli da soli servirebbero da simboli di razze e religioni diverse. Così i preti greci della Chiesa Ortodossa, barbuti e vestiti di nero con nere torri sul capo, hanno per qualche strana ragione i capelli raccolti dietro come quelli di una donna. In ogni caso essi hanno nella loro pompa un che dei tori barbuti della scultura assira; e questa strana moda di arricciare se non di ungere il toro assiro dà al nuovo venuto un’indescrivibile e illogica impressione della innaturale sublimità dell’arte arcaica. Nell’Apocalisse vi è da qualche parte un’ispiratamente inintelligibile allusione a uomini che vengono sulla terra, i cui capelli sono come i capelli delle donne e i cui denti come i denti dei leoni. Non sono mai stato morso da un ecclesiastico ortodosso, e non saprei dire se i suoi denti siano affatto leonini; benché ne abbia veduti sette insieme godersi il pranzo in un albergo con decoro e sollecitudine. Ma l’attorcigliare i capelli alla maniera femminea tocca in noi quella nota dell’anormale che il mistico intendeva trasmettere nella sua poesia, e che altri avvertono piuttosto come un rinculo nell’umorismo. Il migliore e ultimo tocco a questo mondo alla rovescia fu dato quando una signora, osservando uno di questi reverendi gentiluomini che per qualche ragione non recava questa curiosa acconciatura, esclamò, con un tono di straziante sorpresa e sgomento: «Oh, si è tagliato i capelli alla maschietta!»
Here again of course even a superficial glance at the pageant of the street should not be content with its comedy. There is an intellectual interest in the external pomp and air of placid power in these ordinary Orthodox parish priests; especially if we compare them with the comparatively prosaic and jog-trot good nature of the Roman monks, called in this country the Latins. Mingling in the same crowd with these black-robed pontiffs can be seen shaven men in 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 grand simplicity and thought to finish the Crusades with a smile. The spectator will be wise to accept this first contrast that strikes the eye with an impartial intellectual interest; it has nothing to do with personal character, of course, and many Greek priests are as simple in their tastes as they are charming in their manners; while any Roman priests can find as much ritual as they may happen to want in other aspects of their own religion. But it is broadly true that Roman and Greek Catholicism are contrasted in this way in this country; and the contrast is the flat contrary to all our customary associations in the West. In the East it is Roman Catholicism that stands for much that we associate with Protestantism. It is Roman Catholicism that is by comparison plain and practical and scornful of superstition and concerned for social work. It is Greek Catholicism that is stiff with gold and gorgeous with ceremonial, with its hold on ancient history and its inheritance of imperial tradition. In the cant of our own society, we may say it is the Roman who rationalises and the Greek who Romanises. It is the Roman Catholic who is impatient with Russian and Greek childishness, and perpetually appealing for common sense. It is the Greek who defends such childishness as childlike faith and would rebuke such common sense as common scepticism. I do not speak 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 phrases I 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 Englishman and perhaps the English generally were disposed to make an alliance with the Greek Church, had only said by way of comment, “And a good thing too, the Greeks might do something at last.”
Anyhow the first impression is that the Greek is more gorgeous in black than the Roman in colours. But the Greek of course can also appear in colours, especially in those eternal forms 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 him by 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 sort of lustrous coloured paper they put inside Christmas crackers. This beauty has been best achieved in the North in the glory of coloured glass; and I have seen great Gothic windows in which one could really believe that the robes of martyrs were giant rubies or the starry sky a single enormous sapphire. But the colours of the West are transparent, the colours of 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 green doors and golden inner chambers, that are just like the entrance to an Eastern tale. The Orthodox are at least more oriental in 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 sort of silhouette of the crowd like the similar silhouette of the city, a profile or outline of the heads and hats, like the profile of the towers and spires. The tower that makes the Greek priest look like a walking catafalque is by no means alone among the horns thus fantastically exalted. There is the peaked hood of the Armenian priest, for instance; the stately survival of that strange Monophysite heresy which perpetuated itself in pomp and pride mainly through the sublime accident of the Crusades. That black cone also rises above the crowd with something of the immemorial majesty of a pyramid; and rightly so, for it is typical of the prehistoric poetry by which these places live that some say it is a surviving memory of Ararat and the Ark.
Again the high white headgear of the Bethlehem women, or to speak more strictly of the Bethlehem wives, has already been noted in another connection; but it is well to remark it again among the colours of the crowd, because this at least has a significance essential to all criticism of such a crowd. Most travellers from the West regard such an Eastern city far too much as a Moslem city, like the lady whom Mr. Maurice Baring met who travelled all over Russia, and thought all the churches were mosques. But in truth it is very hard to generalise about Jerusalem, precisely because it contains everything, and its contrasts are real contrasts. And anybody who doubts that its Christianity is Christian, a thing fighting for our own culture and morals on the borders of Asia, need only consider the concrete fact of these women of Bethlehem and their costume. There is no need to sneer in any unsympathetic fashion at all the domestic institutions of Islam; the sexes are never quite so stupid as some feminists represent; and I dare say a 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 even the notice of strange men. Often it is only made to disguise her; sometimes it is made to disfigure her. It may be the masking of the face as among the Moslems; it may be the shaving of the head as among the Jews; it may, I believe, be the blackening of the teeth and 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 not only shows all the beauty of her face; and she is often very beautiful. She also wears a towering erection which is as unmistakably meant 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 view of women, but should rather call the Christian view of women. This is the sort of dignity which must of necessity come from some 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.
Anche qui, naturalmente, persino uno sguardo superficiale al corteo della strada non dovrebbe accontentarsi della sua commedia. C’è un interesse intellettuale nella pompa esteriore e nell’aria di placido potere di questi comuni preti ortodossi di parrocchia; specialmente se li paragoniamo alla comparativamente prosaica e monotona bontà di natura dei monaci romani, chiamati in questo paese i Latini. Mescolati alla stessa folla di questi pontefici in nere vesti si possono vedere uomini rasati in saio bruno, che al confronto paiono al tempo stesso indaffarati e oscuri. Costoro sono i figli di san Francesco, che venne in Oriente con una grande semplicità e pensò di concludere le Crociate con un sorriso. Lo spettatore farà bene ad accogliere questo primo contrasto che colpisce l’occhio con un imparziale interesse intellettuale; esso nulla ha a che fare, s’intende, con il carattere personale, e molti preti greci sono tanto semplici nei loro gusti quanto affascinanti nei loro modi; mentre qualsiasi prete romano può trovare tutto il rituale che gli capiti di desiderare in altri aspetti della propria religione. Ma è a grandi linee vero che il cattolicesimo romano e quello greco sono contrapposti in questo modo in questo paese; e il contrasto è l’esatto contrario di tutte le nostre consuete associazioni in Occidente. In Oriente è il cattolicesimo romano che rappresenta molto di ciò che noi associamo al protestantesimo. È il cattolicesimo romano che è, per contrasto, sobrio e pratico e sprezzante della superstizione e preoccupato dell’opera sociale. È il cattolicesimo greco che è rigido d’oro e sfarzoso di cerimoniale, con la sua presa sull’antica storia e la sua eredità di tradizione imperiale. Nel gergo della nostra stessa società, potremmo dire che è il Romano a razionalizzare e il Greco a romanizzare. È il cattolico romano che si spazientisce della puerilità russa e greca, e che si appella di continuo al buon senso. È il Greco che difende tale puerilità come fede fanciullesca, e che rimprovererebbe tale buon senso come volgare scetticismo. Non parlo dei dogmi teologici né delle emozioni più profonde implicate, ma solo, come ho detto, dei contrasti visibili persino nella strada. E l’intera differenza è sufficientemente suggerita in due frasi che ho udito nel giro di pochi giorni. Un illustre anglo-cattolico, che ha egli stesso molta simpatia per le tradizioni greco-ortodosse, mi disse: «Dopo tutto, i Romani furono i primi Puritani». E udii che un francescano, cui era stato detto che questo inglese e forse gli inglesi in generale erano inclini a fare un’alleanza con la Chiesa greca, aveva soltanto commentato: «E buona cosa anche questa: i Greci potrebbero finalmente combinare qualcosa».
Ad ogni modo la prima impressione è che il Greco sia più sfarzoso in nero di quanto il Romano lo sia nei colori. Ma il Greco, naturalmente, può anche apparire in colori, specialmente in quelle eterne forme di colori gelidi eppure infuocati che chiamiamo gemme. Ho visto il patriarca greco, quel magnifico vecchio signore, scendere per la strada come un imperatore delle Mille e una notte, tutto ricoperto di storiche gemme fitte come grani o bottoni, con una gigantesca croce di smeraldi massicci che avrebbe potuto essergli donata dai verdi geni del mare, se qualcuno dei geni fosse cristiano. Queste cose sono giocattoli, ma io sono del tutto favorevole ai giocattoli; e i rubini e gli smeraldi inebriano quasi quanto quella sorta di carta colorata e lucente che infilano dentro i mortaretti di Natale. Questa bellezza è stata meglio raggiunta nel Nord nella gloria del vetro colorato; e ho visto grandi finestre gotiche in cui si poteva davvero credere che le vesti dei martiri fossero rubini giganteschi o il cielo stellato un unico enorme zaffiro. Ma i colori dell’Occidente sono trasparenti, i colori dell’Oriente opachi. Ho parlato delle Mille e una notte, e ve n’è davvero un tocco persino nelle chiese cristiane, accresciuto forse da una tradizione di segretezza paleocristiana. Vi sono scorci di pareti sfarzosamente rivestite di piastrelle, di tende azzurre e porte verdi e aurei sacelli interni, che sono proprio come l’ingresso a un racconto orientale. Gli Ortodossi sono almeno più orientali nel senso di essere più ornamentali; più piatti e decorativi. I Romani sono più occidentali, direi anzi più moderni, nel senso di avere più realismo persino nel loro ritualismo. La croce greca è una croce; la croce romana è un crocifisso.
Ma queste sono faccende più profonde; io sto solo cercando di suggerire una sorta di silhouette della folla come la simile silhouette della città, un profilo o contorno delle teste e dei cappelli, come il profilo delle torri e delle guglie. La torre che fa apparire il prete greco come un catafalco ambulante non è affatto sola fra i corni così fantasticamente esaltati. C’è il cappuccio a punta del prete armeno, per esempio; la maestosa sopravvivenza di quella strana eresia monofisita che si perpetuò in pompa e orgoglio soprattutto grazie al sublime accidente delle Crociate. Anche quel cono nero si erge sopra la folla con qualcosa dell’immemorabile maestà di una piramide; e giustamente, poiché è tipico della poesia preistorica per cui questi luoghi vivono che alcuni dicano essere una superstite memoria dell’Ararat e dell’Arca.
Di nuovo l’alto copricapo bianco delle donne di Betlemme, o per parlare più precisamente delle spose di Betlemme, è già stato notato in altra connessione; ma è bene rilevarlo ancora tra i colori della folla, perché questo almeno ha un significato essenziale per ogni critica di una tale folla. La maggior parte dei viaggiatori dall’Occidente considera una tale città orientale troppo come una città musulmana, al pari della signora che il signor Maurice Baring incontrò, la quale viaggiò per tutta la Russia, e credeva che tutte le chiese fossero moschee. Ma in verità è assai difficile generalizzare su Gerusalemme, appunto perché essa contiene ogni cosa, e i suoi contrasti sono contrasti reali. E chiunque dubiti che il suo cristianesimo sia cristiano, una cosa che combatte per la nostra stessa cultura e morale sui confini dell’Asia, non ha che da considerare il fatto concreto di queste donne di Betlemme e del loro costume. Non c’è alcun bisogno di sogghignare in modo poco benevolo su tutte le istituzioni domestiche dell’Islam; i due sessi non sono mai così stupidi come li rappresentano certe femministe; e oso dire che una donna spesso ha la sua volontà in un harem tanto bene quanto in una casa. Ma la grande differenza rimane. E se c’è una cosa, io penso, che si possa dire con sicurezza di tutta l’Asia e di tutte le tribù orientali, è questa: che se una donna sposata porta un qualche segno distintivo, esso è sempre inteso a impedirle di ricevere l’ammirazione o persino l’attenzione di uomini estranei. Spesso è fatto solo per travestirla; talvolta è fatto per sfigurarla. Può essere il mascheramento del volto come tra i musulmani; può essere la rasatura del capo come tra gli ebrei; può, io credo, essere l’annerimento dei denti e altri strani espedienti fra le genti dell’Estremo Oriente. Ma non è mai inteso a farla apparire magnifica in pubblico; e la sposa di Betlemme è fatta per apparire magnifica in pubblico. Ella non solo mostra tutta la bellezza del suo volto, ed è spesso assai bella. Porta inoltre una torreggiante costruzione che è tanto inequivocabilmente intesa a darle importanza quanto la triplice tiara del Papa. Una donna che porta una tale corona, e la porta senza velo, sta, e può concepibilmente stare, solo per ciò che noi chiamiamo la concezione occidentale della donna, ma che dovremmo piuttosto chiamare la concezione cristiana della donna. Questo è il genere di dignità che deve per necessità provenire da qualche vaga memoria della cavalleria. La donna può essere o non essere, come dice la leggenda, una discendente diretta di un Crociato. Ma sia o no sua figlia, ella è certamente sua erede.
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 crowd offers such varied shapes and colours to the eye, when it also offers much deeper divisions and even dilemmas to the intelligence. The black dress of the Moslem woman and the white dress of the Christian woman are in sober truth as different as black and white. They stand for real principles in a real opposition; and the black and white will not easily disappear in the dull grey of our own compromises. The one tradition will defend what it regards as modesty, and the other what it regards as dignity, with passions far deeper than most of our paltry political appetites. Nor do I see how we can deny such a right of defence, even in the case we consider the less enlightened. It is made all the more difficult by the fact that those who consider themselves the pioneers of enlightenment generally also consider themselves the protectors of native races and aboriginal rights. Whatever view we take of the Moslem Arab, we must at least admit that the greater includes the less. It is manifestly absurd to say we have no right to interfere in his country, but have a right to interfere in his home.
It is the intense interest of Jerusalem that there can thus be two universes in the same street. Indeed there are ten rather than two; and it is a proverb that the fight is not only between Christian and Moslem, but between Christian and Christian. At this moment, it must be admitted, it is almost entirely a fight of Christian and Moslem allied against Jew. But of that I shall have to speak later; the point for the moment is that the varied colours of 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 ideas has such a visible and vivid heraldry.
And that fact alone may well leave the spectator with one final reflection; for it is a matter in which the modern world may well have to learn something from the motley rabble of this remote Eastern town.
It may be an odd thing to suggest that a crowd in Bond Street or Piccadilly should model itself on this masquerade of religions. It would be facile and fascinating to turn it into a satire or an extravaganza. Every good and innocent mind would be gratified with the image of a bowler hat in the precise proportions of the Dome of 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 dominated with 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 insinuate that we are not very likely ever to meet them in the Strand. A man wearing whiskers is not even compelled to plead some sort of excuse or authority for wearing whiskers, as the Jew can for wearing ringlets; and though the Anglican clergyman may indeed be very loyal to his mother church, there might be considerable hesitation if his mother bade him bind his hair. Nevertheless a more historical view of the London and Jerusalem crowds will show as far from impossible to domesticate such symbols; that some day a lady’s jewels 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 them as inferior to ourselves.
When the Crusaders came to Palestine, and came riding up that road from Jaffa where the orange plantations glow on either side, they came with motives which may have been mixed and are certainly disputed. There may have been different theories among the Crusaders; there are certainly different theories among the critics of the Crusaders. Many sought God, some gold, some perhaps black magic. But whatever else they were in search of, they were not in search of the picturesque. They were not drawn from a drab civilisation by that mere thirst for colour 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 men who rode up that road were dressed to match the most glorious orange 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 household of 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 more significant than the corresponding symbols of the Eastern civilisation. It is true that heraldry began beautifully as an art and afterwards degenerated into a science. But even in being a science it had to possess a significance; and the Western colours were often allegorical where the Eastern were only accidental. To a certain extent this more philosophical ornament was doubtless imitated; and I have remarked elsewhere on the highly heraldic lions which even the Saracens carved over the gate of St. Stephen. But it is the extraordinary and even exasperating fact that it was not imitated as the most meaningless sort of modern vulgarity is imitated. King Richard’s great red hat embroidered with beasts and birds has not overshadowed the earth so much as the billycock, which no one has yet thought of embroidering with any such natural and universal imagery. The cockney tourist is not only more likely to set out with the intention of knocking them, but he has actually knocked them; and Orientals are imitating the tweeds of the tourist more than they imitated the stripes of the squire. It is a curious and perhaps melancholy truth that the world is imitating our worst, our weariness and our dingy decline, when it did not imitate our best and the high moment of our morning.
La si può porre per ultima fra le figure locali che ho qui descritto, per la particolare ragione che il suo caso riveste un significato alquanto più profondo. Poiché non è possibile accontentarsi del fatto che la folla offra all’occhio forme e colori così vari, quando essa offre anche divisioni assai più profonde e persino dilemmi all’intelligenza. La veste nera della donna musulmana e la veste bianca della donna cristiana sono, in sobria verità, diverse come il nero e il bianco. Esse stanno per princìpi reali in una reale opposizione; e il nero e il bianco non svaniranno facilmente nel grigio spento dei nostri compromessi. L’una tradizione difenderà ciò che considera pudore, e l’altra ciò che considera dignità, con passioni assai più profonde della maggior parte dei nostri meschini appetiti politici. Né vedo come possiamo negare un tale diritto di difesa, anche nel caso che riteniamo il meno illuminato. Ciò è reso tanto più difficile dal fatto che coloro i quali si considerano i pionieri dell’illuminismo generalmente si considerano anche i protettori delle razze indigene e dei diritti aborigeni. Qualunque opinione ci facciamo dell’arabo musulmano, dobbiamo almeno ammettere che il maggiore include il minore. È manifestamente assurdo dire che non abbiamo il diritto di intervenire nel suo paese, ma abbiamo il diritto di intervenire nella sua casa.
È l’intenso interesse di Gerusalemme che possano così esistere due universi nella stessa strada. Anzi ve ne sono dieci piuttosto che due; ed è proverbiale che la lotta non è soltanto tra cristiano e musulmano, ma tra cristiano e cristiano. In questo momento, bisogna ammetterlo, è quasi interamente una lotta di cristiano e musulmano alleati contro l’ebreo. Ma di ciò dovrò parlare più avanti; il punto per ora è che i colori vari delle strade sono un vero simbolo dei colori vari delle anime. È forse l’unico luogo moderno dove la guerra combattuta tra le idee ha un’araldica così visibile e vivida.
E questo solo fatto può ben lasciare lo spettatore con una riflessione finale; poiché è una faccenda in cui il mondo moderno potrebbe ben dover imparare qualcosa dalla variopinta plebaglia di questa remota città orientale.
Può sembrare una cosa strana suggerire che una folla in Bond Street o a Piccadilly dovrebbe modellarsi su questa mascherata di religioni. Sarebbe facile e affascinante trasformarla in una satira o in una stravaganza. Ogni mente buona e innocente sarebbe gratificata dall’immagine di una bombetta nelle esatte proporzioni della Cupola di San Paolo, e sormontata da una piccola sfera e da una croce, a simboleggiare la fedeltà di qualche anglicano alla sua chiesa madre. Potrebbe persino risultar piacevole vedere la strada dominata da un più aggraziato cilindro modellato sulla Torre Eiffel, e significante la fede di chi lo porta nell’impresa scientifica, o forse nel suo frequente accompagnamento di corruzione politica. Questi sarebbero equi paralleli occidentali ai copricapi di Gerusalemme; modellati sul Monte Ararat o sul Tempio di Salomone, e taluni potrebbero insinuare che non è molto probabile che li incontriamo mai nello Strand. Un uomo che porta i favoriti non è nemmeno costretto ad addurre una qualche scusa o autorità per portare i favoriti, come l’ebreo può fare per portare i boccoli; e sebbene il pastore anglicano possa in effetti essere assai fedele alla sua chiesa madre, vi sarebbe una considerevole esitazione se sua madre gli ordinasse di legarsi i capelli. Nondimeno una veduta più storica delle folle di Londra e di Gerusalemme mostrerà quanto sia tutt’altro che impossibile addomesticare tali simboli; che un giorno i gioielli di una dama potrebbero significare qualcosa di simile ai sacri gioielli del Patriarca, o le pellicce di una dama significare qualcosa di simile al turbante foderato di pelliccia del Rabbino. La Storia invero ci mostrerà che non siamo tanto superiori a loro quanto inferiori a noi stessi.
Quando i Crociati vennero in Palestina, e vennero cavalcando su per quella strada da Giaffa dove le piantagioni di aranci risplendono d’ambo i lati, vennero con moventi che possono essere stati misti e sono certamente controversi. Possono esservi state diverse teorie fra i Crociati; vi sono certamente diverse teorie fra i critici dei Crociati. Molti cercavano Dio, alcuni l’oro, alcuni forse la nera magia. Ma qualunque altra cosa cercassero, non erano in cerca del pittoresco. Non erano attratti fuori da una civiltà scialba da quella mera sete di colore che attira tanti artisti moderni ai bazar dell’Oriente. In quei giorni vi erano colori in Occidente non meno che in Oriente; e un bagliore nel tramonto non meno che nell’aurora. Molti degli uomini che cavalcavano su per quella strada erano abbigliati in modo da eguagliare il più glorioso giardino d’aranci e da rivaleggiare col più magnifico re orientale. King Richard non può essere stato considerato dimesso, nemmeno al confronto, quando cavalcava su quell’alta sella rossa istoriata di leoni dorati, col suo grande cappello scarlatto e la sua veste di mezzelune d’argento. Quello scudiero del casato relativamente poco appariscente di Joinville, che era vestito di scarlatto striato di giallo, dev’essere stato certamente capace (se mi è consentita l’espressione) di stupirli nel più magnifico bazar asiatico. Né questi simboli esteriori erano meno significativi, ma piuttosto più significativi dei corrispondenti simboli della civiltà orientale. È vero che l’araldica cominciò splendidamente come arte e in seguito degenerò in scienza. Ma anche essendo scienza doveva possedere un significato; e i colori occidentali erano spesso allegorici là dove quelli orientali erano soltanto accidentali. In una certa misura questo ornamento più filosofico fu senza dubbio imitato; e ho osservato altrove sui leoni altamente araldici che persino i Saraceni scolpirono sopra la porta di Santo Stefano. Ma è il fatto straordinario e persino esasperante che esso non fu imitato come viene imitata la specie più priva di senso della volgarità moderna. Il grande cappello rosso di King Richard ricamato di bestie e uccelli non ha adombrato la terra tanto quanto la bombetta, che nessuno ha ancora pensato di ricamare con una qualche immagine così naturale e universale. Il turista cockney non solo è più incline a partire con l’intenzione di stupirli, ma li ha effettivamente stupiti; e gli orientali imitano i tweed del turista più di quanto imitassero le strisce dello scudiero. È una curiosa e forse malinconica verità che il mondo stia imitando il nostro peggio, la nostra stanchezza e il nostro squallido declino, quando non imitò il nostro meglio e l’alto momento del nostro mattino.
Perhaps it is only when civilisation becomes a disease that it becomes an infection. Possibly it is only when it becomes a very virulent disease that it becomes an epidemic. Possibly again that is the meaning both of cosmopolitanism and imperialism. Anyhow the tribes sitting by Afric’s sunny fountains did not take up the song when Francis of Assisi stood on the very mountain of the Middle Ages, singing the Canticle of the Sun. When Michael Angelo carved a statue in snow, Eskimos did not copy him, despite their large natural quarries or resources. Laplanders never made a model of the Elgin Marbles, with a frieze of reindeers instead of horses; nor did Hottentots try to paint Mumbo Jumbo as Raphael had painted Madonnas. But many a savage king has worn a top-hat, and the barbarian has sometimes been so debased as to add to it a pair of trousers. Explosive bullets and the brutal factory system numbers of advanced natives are anxious to possess. And it was this reflection, arising out of the mere pleasure of the eye in the parti-coloured crowd before me, that brought back my mind to the chief problem and peril of our position in Palestine, on which I touched earlier in this chapter; the peril which is largely at 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 not so much the English merchant as the Jewish money-lender. I shall write elsewhere of better types of Jew and the truths they really represent; but the Jewish money-lender is in a curious and complex sense the representative of this unfortunate paradox. He is not only unpopular both in the East and West, but he is unpopular in 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 bustles and hustles too much; and in Palestine some of the unpopularity even 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 the better sort of Jew, or of the better sort of British influence. The same ignominious inversion which reproduces everywhere the factory chimney without the church tower, which spreads a cockney commerce but not a Christian culture, has given many men a vague feeling that the influence of modern civilisation will surround these ragged but coloured groups with something as dreary and discoloured, as unnatural and as desolate as the unfamiliar snow in which they were shivering as I watched them. There seemed a sort of sinister omen in this strange visitation that the north had sent them; in the fact that when the north wind blew at last, it had only scattered on them this silver dust of death.
It may be that this more melancholy mood was intensified by that pale 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 my own country against my own door I should have thought it the triumph of 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 it were not comic but tragic. The news that came in seemed in that little lonely 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 regarding the war, merely as an unmixed misery, and here the misery was really unmixed. As the snow began to melt corpses were found in it, homes were hopelessly buried, and even the gradual clearing of the roads only brought him stories of the lonely hamlets lost in the hills. It seemed as if a breath of the aimless destruction that wanders in the world had drifted across us; and no task remained for men but 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 tree of the hundred deaths, that was the type of the eternal Caliphate of the Crescent, was cast down and lying broken in the snow.
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Forse è solo quando la civiltà diventa una malattia che diventa un’infezione. È possibile che sia solo quando diventa una malattia molto virulenta che diventa un’epidemia. Forse ancora questo è il significato sia del cosmopolitismo che dell’imperialismo. Comunque le tribù sedute accanto alle soleggiate fonti d’Africa non presero su di sé la canzone quando Francesco d’Assisi si ergeva sulla stessa montagna del Medioevo, cantando il Cantico del Sole. Quando Michele Angelo scolpì una statua nella neve, gli Eschimesi non lo imitarono, nonostante le loro grandi cave naturali o risorse. I Lapponi non fecero mai un modello dei Marmi di Elgin, con un fregio di renne invece che cavalli; né gli Ottentotti cercarono di dipingere Mumbo Jumbo come Raffaello aveva dipinto le Madonne. Ma molti re selvaggi indossarono un cilindro, e talvolta il barbaro è stato così degradato da aggiungervi anche un paio di pantaloni. Proiettili esplosivi e il brutale sistema delle fabbriche sono cose che numerosi nativi avanzati desiderano possedere. E fu questa riflessione, nata dal semplice piacere dell’occhio nella folla dai colori variopinti davanti a me, che riportò la mia mente al problema principale e al pericolo della nostra posizione in Palestina, su cui ho toccato più avanti in questo capitolo; il pericolo che è largamente alla base sia delle obiezioni giuste che di quelle ingiuste allo Zionismo. È la paura che l’Occidente, nel suo moderno umore mercantile, non mandi i suoi migliori ma i suoi peggiori. Il modo artigianale di dirlo, dal punto di vista dell’arabo, è che ciò significherà non tanto il commerciante inglese quanto l’usuraio ebreo. Scriverò altrove di tipi migliori di ebrei e delle verità che rappresentano realmente; ma l’usuraio ebreo è in un senso curioso e complesso il rappresentante di questo sfortunato paradosso. Non è solo impopolare sia in Oriente che in Occidente, ma è impopolare in Occidente per essere orientale e in Oriente per essere occidentale. In Europa viene accusato di astuzia e segretezza asiatiche, e in Asia di volgarità ed esuberanza europee. Ho detto a proposito dell’arabo che la dignità dell’orientale sta nella sua lunga veste; l’ebreo semplicemente mercantile è l’orientale che ha perso la sua lunga veste, il che porta a una pericolosa vivacità nelle gambe. Si affanna e si agita troppo; e in Palestina parte dell’impopolarità anche del miglior tipo di ebreo è semplicemente dovuta alla sua irrequietezza. Ma rimane una paura che non sarà questione del miglior tipo di ebreo, o del miglior tipo di influenza britannica. La stessa ignominiosa inversione che riproduce ovunque il camino della fabbrica senza la torre della chiesa, che diffonde un commercio cockney ma non una cultura cristiana, ha dato a molti uomini una vaga sensazione che l’influenza della civiltà moderna circonderà questi gruppi colorati e stracciati con qualcosa di altrettanto desolato e sbiadito, innaturale e deserto come la neve sconosciuta in cui stavano tremando mentre li osservavo. Sembrava esserci una sorta di sinistro presagio in questa strana visita che il nord aveva mandato loro; nel fatto che quando finalmente soffiò il vento del nord, sparse su di loro solo questa polvere d’argento della morte.
Può darsi che questo umore più malinconico fosse accentuato da quel paesaggio pallido e da quei sentieri impraticabili. Non disprezzo la neve; al contrario, ne sono incantato; e se si fosse accumulata altrettanto profondamente davanti alla mia porta nel mio paese, l’avrei considerata il trionfo del Natale, una cosa tanto comica quanto il mio cane e la mula. Ma le persone con quegli stracci colorati non la gradivano; e gli effetti della neve non erano comici ma tragici. Le notizie che arrivavano sembravano in quella piccola città solitaria come quelle di una grande guerra, o addirittura di una grande sconfitta. Gli uomini giunsero a considerarla, così come hanno fin troppo spesso considerato la guerra, semplicemente come un’infelicità pura, e qui l’infelicità era davvero pura. Mentre la neve cominciava a sciogliersi, furono trovati dei cadaveri, le case furono irrimediabilmente sepolte, e persino il graduale sgombero delle strade portò solo notizie di piccoli villaggi solitari perduti tra le colline. Sembrava che un soffio della distruzione senza scopo che vaga nel mondo ci avesse attraversati; e non rimase altro compito agli uomini se non la stancante ricostruzione delle rovine e il conteggio dei morti.
Solo mentre uscivo dalla Porta di Giaffa un uomo mi disse che l’albero dei cento morti, simbolo del califfato eterno della Mezzaluna, era stato abbattuto e giaceva spezzato nella neve.
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CHAPTER VI
THE GROUPS OF THE CITY
Palestine is a striped country; that is the first effect of landscape on the eye. It runs in great parallel lines wavering into vast hills and valleys, but preserving the parallel pattern; as if drawn boldly but accurately with gigantic chalks of green and grey and red and yellow. The natural explanation or (to speak less foolishly) the natural process of this is simple enough. The stripes are the strata of the rock, only they are stripped by the great rains, so that everything has to grow on ledges, repeating yet again that terraced character to 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 commonly a red clay richer than that of Devon; a red clay of which it would be 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 is literally crowded with those crimson anemones which might well have called forth the great saying touching Solomon in all his glory. And even what rock there is is coloured with a thousand secondary and tertiary tints, as are the walls and streets of the Holy City which is built from the quarries of these hills. For the old stones of the old Jerusalem are as precious as the precious stones of 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 might be 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 forget that recurrent things are eternal things. We tend to forget that subtle 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 them do not prove that they did not realise them. When Wordsworth speaks of “the clouds that gather round the setting sun,” we assume that he has seen every shadow of colour and every curve of form; but when the Hebrew poet says “He hath made the clouds his chariot”; we do not always realise that he was full 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 dawn was always grey in the Stone Age or brown in the Bronze Age.
But there is another parable written in those long lines of many-coloured clay and stone. Palestine is in every sense a stratified country. It is not only true in the natural sense, as here where the clay has fallen away and left visible the very ribs of the hills. It is true in 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 frontier does 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 not beside the Christian but on top of the Christian. It is not merely a 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 besieged from 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 states are houses in which the kitchen has declared war on the drawing-room. But this will give no notion of the toppling pagoda of political and religious and racial differences, of which the name is Palestine. To explain that it is necessary to give the traveller’s first impressions more particularly in their order, and before I return to this view of the society as stratified, I must state the problem more practically as it presents itself while the society still seems fragmentary.
We are always told that the Turk kept the peace between the Christian sects. It would be nearer the nerve of vital truth to say that he made the war between the Christian sects. But it would be nearer still to say that the war is something not made by Turks but made up by infidels. The tourist visiting the 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 fraticidal war perpetually waged by Christian against Christian in Jerusalem. It freshens the free sense of adventure to wander through those crooked and cavernous streets, expecting every minute to see the Armenian Patriarch trying to stick a knife into the Greek Patriarch; just as it would add to the romance of London to linger about Lambeth and Westminster in the hope of seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury locked in a deadly grapple with the President of the Wesleyan Conference. And if we return to our homes at evening without having actually seen these things with the eye of flesh, the vision has none the less shone on 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 is an armed peace.
I have already explained the sense in which I say that the Moslems are unhistoric or even anti-historic. Perhaps it would be near the truth to say that they are prehistoric. They attach themselves to the tremendous truisms which men might have realised before they had any political experience at all; which might have been scratched with 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 need for lies. But their mood is not historic, they do not wish to grapple with the past; they do not love its complexities; nor do they understand the enthusiasm for its details and even its doubts. Now in all this the Moslems of a place like Jerusalem are the very opposite of the Christians of Jerusalem. The Christianity of Jerusalem is highly historic, and cannot be understood without historical imagination. And this is not the strong point perhaps of those among us who generally record their impressions of the place. As the educated Englishman does not know the history of England, it would be unreasonable to 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 include the Roman Empire in the West and in the East, the Catholic Church in its two great divisions, the Jewish race, the memories of Greece and Egypt, and the whole Mahometan world in Asia and Africa. It may be that he regards these as small things; but I should be glad if he would cast his eye over human history, and tell me what are the large things. The truth is that the things that meet to-day in Jerusalem 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 bored by them. But to understand them it is necessary to have something which is much commoner in Jerusalem than in Oxford or Boston; that sort of living history which we call tradition.
CAPITOLO VI
I GRUPPI DELLA CITTÀ
La Palestina è un paese striato; è il primo effetto che il paesaggio produce sull’occhio. Si stende in grandi linee parallele che ondeggiano in vasti colli e valli, ma conservano il disegno parallelo; come se fosse tracciata con mano ardita ma precisa da gessetti giganteschi di verde e grigio e rosso e giallo. La spiegazione naturale, o (per dire meno scioccamente) il processo naturale di ciò, è abbastanza semplice. Le strisce sono gli strati della roccia, se non che vengono denudati dalle grandi piogge, sicché ogni cosa deve crescere su cornici, ripetendo ancora una volta quel carattere terrazzato che si vede nelle vigne e nelle vie a scalinata della città. Ma sebbene la causa risieda in un certo senso nella forza rovinosa della pioggia, le tinte non sono le tinte tetre della rovina. La terra che vi è, per lo più è un’argilla rossa più ricca di quella del Devon; un’argilla rossa della quale sarebbe facile credere che fossero fatte le membra gigantesche del primo uomo. L’erba che vi è non è soltanto uno smalto di smeraldo, ma è letteralmente affollata di quegli anemoni cremisi che ben potrebbero aver suscitato la grande sentenza che riguarda Salomone in tutta la sua gloria. E persino la roccia che vi è è colorata di mille tinte secondarie e terziarie, come le mura e le vie della Santa Città che è costruita con le cave di questi colli. Poiché le antiche pietre della vecchia Gerusalemme sono preziose quanto le pietre preziose della Nuova Gerusalemme; e in certi momenti del mattino o del tramonto, ogni ciottolo potrebbe essere una perla.
E tutti questi strati colorati si levano così in alto e si stendono così lontano che potrebbero essere cieli anziché pendii. È come se guardassimo in alto verso un tramonto congelato; o un’alba fissata per sempre con le sue fuggevoli strisce di nuvole. E in verità la fantasia non è priva di una suggestione simbolica. Questa è la terra delle cose eterne; ma tendiamo troppo a dimenticare che le cose ricorrenti sono cose eterne. Tendiamo a dimenticare che i toni sottili e le tinte delicate, sia nei colli sia nei cieli, erano per i poeti e i saggi primitivi altrettanto visibili di quanto lo sono per noi; e le parole forti e semplici con cui li descrivono non provano che non li percepissero. Quando Wordsworth parla delle «nubi che si raccolgono intorno al sole che tramonta», presumiamo che egli abbia veduto ogni ombra di colore e ogni curva di forma; ma quando il poeta ebraico dice «Egli ha fatto delle nubi il suo carro», non sempre ci rendiamo conto che egli era colmo di emozioni indescrivibili suscitate da spettacoli indescrivibili. Vagamente presumiamo che il cielo stesso fosse più scialbo nei tempi primitivi. Ci sembra che vi fosse stata una moda nei tramonti; o come se l’alba fosse sempre grigia nell’Età della Pietra o bruna nell’Età del Bronzo.
Ma vi è un’altra parabola scritta in quelle lunghe linee di argilla e pietra dai molti colori. La Palestina è in ogni senso un paese stratificato. Non è vero soltanto nel senso naturale, come qui dove l’argilla è franata e ha lasciato visibili le costole stesse dei colli. È vero nelle cave dove gli uomini scavano, nelle città morte dove essi fanno scavi, e persino nelle città viventi dove ancora combattono e pregano. Il dolore di tutta la Palestina è che le sue divisioni nella cultura, nella politica e nella teologia sono come le sue divisioni nella geologia. La linea di divisione è orizzontale anziché verticale. La frontiera non corre tra Stati ma tra strati sovrapposti. L’Ebreo non apparve accanto al Cananeo ma sopra il Cananeo; il Greco non accanto all’Ebreo ma sopra l’Ebreo; il Musulmano non accanto al Cristiano ma sopra il Cristiano. Non è soltanto una casa divisa contro se stessa, ma una divisa attraverso se stessa. È una casa in cui il primo piano combatte il secondo piano, in cui il seminterrato è oppresso dall’alto e le soffitte sono assediate dal basso. Vi è una gran quantità di polvere da sparo nelle cantine; e la gente non sta affatto tranquilla nemmeno sul tetto. In giorni di ciò che alcuni chiamano bolscevismo, si può dire che la maggior parte degli Stati sono case in cui la cucina ha dichiarato guerra al salotto. Ma ciò non darà alcuna idea della pagoda vacillante di differenze politiche e religiose e razziali, il cui nome è Palestina. Per spiegare ciò è necessario esporre le prime impressioni del viaggiatore più particolarmente nel loro ordine, e prima di tornare a questa visione della società come stratificata, devo enunciare il problema più praticamente come esso si presenta mentre la società sembra ancora frammentaria.
Ci vien sempre detto che il Turco mantenne la pace tra le sette cristiane. Sarebbe più vicino al nervo della verità vitale dire che egli fece la guerra tra le sette cristiane. Ma sarebbe ancora più vicino dire che la guerra è qualcosa non fatta dai Turchi ma inventata dagli infedeli. Il turista che visita le chiese è spesso incredulo verso le esagerazioni che si raccontano su di esse; ma è del tutto credulo verso la più grossa di tutte le fandonie, quella che si racconta contro di esse. Egli crede in una frenetica guerra fratricida combattuta perpetuamente da Cristiano contro Cristiano in Gerusalemme. Ravviva il libero senso dell’avventura vagare per quelle vie tortuose e cavernose, aspettandosi ad ogni minuto di vedere il Patriarca armeno che tenta di conficcare un coltello nel Patriarca greco; così come aggiungerebbe al romanzesco di Londra indugiare presso Lambeth e Westminster nella speranza di vedere l’Arcivescovo di Canterbury avvinghiato in una lotta mortale con il Presidente della Conferenza wesleyana. E se torniamo alle nostre case la sera senza aver realmente veduto queste cose con l’occhio della carne, la visione nondimeno ha brillato sul nostro cammino, e ci ha condotti dietro molti angoli con vigilanza e con speranza. Ma in nuda realtà la religione non comporta guerra perpetua in Oriente, non più di quanto il patriottismo comporti guerra perpetua in Occidente. Ciò che comporta in entrambi i casi è un atteggiamento difensivo; una vigilanza sulle frontiere. Non vi è guerra; ma vi è una pace armata.
Ho già spiegato il senso in cui dico che i Musulmani sono astorici o persino anti-storici. Forse sarebbe vicino alla verità dire che sono preistorici. Essi si attengono ai tremendi truismi che gli uomini potrebbero aver colto prima ancora di avere una qualsiasi esperienza politica; che potrebbero essere stati graffiati con primitivi coltelli di selce su primitivi vasi di argilla. Essendo semplici e sinceri, non sfuggono al bisogno di leggende; direi quasi che, essendo onesti, non sfuggono al bisogno di menzogne. Ma la loro disposizione non è storica, non desiderano misurarsi col passato; non ne amano le complessità; né comprendono l’entusiasmo per i suoi dettagli e persino per i suoi dubbi. Ora in tutto questo i Musulmani di un luogo come Gerusalemme sono l’esatto opposto dei Cristiani di Gerusalemme. Il Cristianesimo di Gerusalemme è altamente storico, e non può essere compreso senza immaginazione storica. E questo non è forse il punto forte di coloro fra noi che generalmente registrano le proprie impressioni del luogo. Poiché l’Inglese colto non conosce la storia dell’Inghilterra, sarebbe irragionevole aspettarsi che conosca la storia di Moab o della Mesopotamia. Egli riceve l’impressione, visitando i santuari di Gerusalemme, di un certo numero di piccole sette che bisticciano su piccole cose. In breve, ha davanti a sé un groviglio di banalità, che comprende l’Impero Romano in Occidente e in Oriente, la Chiesa Cattolica nelle sue due grandi divisioni, la razza ebraica, le memorie della Grecia e dell’Egitto, e tutto il mondo maomettano in Asia e in Africa. Può darsi che egli consideri queste piccole cose; ma sarei lieto se volgesse lo sguardo sulla storia umana, e mi dicesse quali siano le grandi cose. La verità è che le cose che oggi si incontrano in Gerusalemme sono di gran lunga le più grandi cose che il mondo abbia finora veduto. Se esse non sono importanti, nulla su questa terra è importante, e di certo non le impressioni di coloro che per caso ne sono annoiati. Ma per comprenderle è necessario avere qualcosa che è assai più comune in Gerusalemme che a Oxford o a Boston; quella sorta di storia vivente che chiamiamo tradizione.
For instance, the critic generally begins by dismissing these conflicts with the statement that they are all about small points of theology. I do not admit that theological points are small points. Theology is only thought applied to religion; and those who prefer a thoughtless religion need not be so very disdainful of others with a more rationalistic taste. The old joke that the Greek sects only differed about a single letter is about the lamest and most illogical joke in the world. An atheist and a theist only differ by a single letter; yet theologians are so subtle as to distinguish definitely between the two. But though I do not in any case allow that it is idle to be concerned about theology, as a matter of actual fact these quarrels are not chiefly concerned about theology. They are concerned about history. They are concerned with the things about which the only human sort of history is concerned; great memories of great men, great battles for great ideas, the love of brave people for beautiful places, and the faith by which the dead are alive. It is quite true that with this 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 than about religion, in the sense of theology. That is, they are just such heroic passions about the past as we call in the West by the name of nationalism; but they are conditioned by the extraordinarily complicated position of the nations, or what corresponds to the nations. We of the West, if we wish to understand it, must imagine ourselves as left with all our local loves and family memories unchanged, but the places affected by them intermingled and tumbled about by some almost inconceivable convulsion. We must imagine cities and landscapes to have turned on some unseen pivots, or been shifted about by some unseen machinery, so that our nearest was furthest and our remotest enemy 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 threads of 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 loyalties as steady as the memories and loyalties of the little crowd in 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 truth and falsehood in a chaos of time and space.
We have to conceive that the Tomb of Napoleon is in the middle of Stratford-on-Avon, and that the Nelson Column is erected on the field of Bannockburn; that Westminster Abbey has taken wings 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 shrine of Lourdes have to look for it in the Island of Runnymede, and that the only existing German statue of Bismarck is to be found in the Pantheon at Paris. This intolerable topsy-turvydom is no exaggeration of the way in which stories cut across each other and sites are imposed on each other in the historic chaos of the Holy City. Now we in the West are very lucky in having our nations normally distributed into their native lands; so that good patriots can talk about themselves without perpetually annoying their neighbours. Some of the pacifists tell us that national frontiers and divisions are evil because they exasperate us to war. It would be far truer to say that national frontiers and divisions keep us at peace. It would be far truer to say that we can always love each other so long as we do not see each other. But the people of 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 naturally as a flower springs from a flower-bed, they have to bless the soil and curse the stones that stand on it. While the land we love is solid under our feet to the earth’s centre, they have to see all 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 modern city is a big town full of small things. All the most important and interesting powers in history are here gathered within the area of a quiet village; and if they are not always friends, at least they are necessarily neighbours. This is a point of intellectual interest, and even intensity, that is far too little realised. It is a matter of modern complaint that in a place like Jerusalem the Christian groups 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 they even meet each other? In a large town men live in small cliques, which are much narrower than classes; but in this small town they live at least by large contacts, even if they are conflicts. Nor is it really true, in the daily humours of human life, that they are only conflicts. I have heard an eminent English clergyman from Cambridge bargaining for a brass lamp with a Syrian of the Greek Church, and asking the advice of a Franciscan friar who was standing smiling in the same shop. I have met the same representative of the Church of 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 often would 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 once in a lifetime. Even if he were a bigot, he would be bound in 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 other people bigots, but at the worst they could not be unconscious bigots. They could not live in such uncorrected complacency as is possible to a larger social set in a larger social system. They could not be 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 something of chivalry in the courtesy of their armed truce, and it is a great school of manners that includes such differences in morals.
Per esempio, il critico generalmente comincia liquidando questi conflitti con l’affermazione che riguardano tutti piccoli punti di teologia. Non ammetto che i punti teologici siano piccoli punti. La teologia non è che pensiero applicato alla religione; e coloro che preferiscono una religione irriflessiva non hanno bisogno di essere così sdegnosi verso altri dal gusto più razionalistico. La vecchia battuta secondo cui le sette greche differivano solo per una singola lettera è la più zoppa e illogica battuta del mondo. Un ateo e un teista differiscono solo per una singola lettera; eppure i teologi sono tanto sottili da distinguere nettamente tra i due. Ma benché in nessun caso io ammetta che sia ozioso preoccuparsi di teologia, di fatto queste dispute non riguardano principalmente la teologia. Riguardano la storia. Riguardano le cose di cui si occupa l’unica sorta umana di storia; grandi memorie di grandi uomini, grandi battaglie per grandi idee, l’amore di gente coraggiosa per luoghi belli, e la fede per cui i morti sono vivi. È del tutto vero che con questo senso storico gli uomini ereditano pesanti responsabilità e vendette, furore e dolore e vergogna. È anche vero che senza di esso gli uomini muoiono, e nessuno scava nemmeno le loro tombe.
La verità è che queste dispute riguardano il patriottismo più che la religione, nel senso della teologia. Cioè, sono proprio quelle eroiche passioni per il passato che in Occidente chiamiamo col nome di nazionalismo; ma sono condizionate dalla posizione straordinariamente complicata delle nazioni, o di ciò che corrisponde alle nazioni. Noi dell’Occidente, se vogliamo comprenderlo, dobbiamo immaginare di essere lasciati con tutti i nostri amori locali e le nostre memorie familiari immutati, ma con i luoghi a essi legati mescolati e sconvolti da qualche convulsione quasi inconcepibile. Dobbiamo immaginare che città e paesaggi abbiano ruotato su perni invisibili, o siano stati spostati da qualche macchinario invisibile, così che il nostro più vicino fosse il più lontano e il nostro nemico più remoto il nostro vicino. Dobbiamo immaginare monumenti nei luoghi sbagliati, e le antichità di una contea rovesciate sopra un’altra. E dobbiamo immaginare attraverso tutto ciò i fili sottili ma tenaci della tradizione ovunque aggrovigliati eppure ovunque non spezzati. Dobbiamo raffigurarci una nuova mappa fatta dei frammenti spezzati della vecchia mappa; e tuttavia con ciascuno che ricorda la vecchia mappa e ignora la nuova. In breve dobbiamo cercare di immaginare, o piuttosto dobbiamo cercare di sperare, che le nostre memorie siano tanto lunghe e le nostre lealtà tanto ferme quanto le memorie e le lealtà della piccola folla di Gerusalemme; e sperare, o pregare, di poter essere solo tanto rigidi, tanto rabbiosi e tanto bigotti quanto lo è questa gente ottenebrata. Allora forse potremmo preservare tutte le nostre distinzioni di verità e falsità in un caos di tempo e spazio.
Dobbiamo concepire che la Tomba di Napoleone si trovi nel mezzo di Stratford-on-Avon, e che la Colonna di Nelson sia eretta sul campo di Bannockburn; che l’Abbazia di Westminster abbia messo le ali e sia volata via verso la più romantica posizione sul Reno, e che la lignea «Victory» sia arenata, come l’Arca sull’Ararat, sulla cima della Collina di Tara; che i pellegrini al santuario di Lourdes debbano cercarlo nell’Isola di Runnymede, e che l’unica statua tedesca esistente di Bismarck si trovi nel Pantheon di Parigi. Questo intollerabile capovolgimento non è alcuna esagerazione del modo in cui le storie si intersecano e i luoghi si sovrappongono l’uno all’altro nel caos storico della Santa Città. Ora noi in Occidente siamo molto fortunati ad avere le nostre nazioni normalmente distribuite nelle loro terre native; così che i buoni patrioti possono parlare di sé senza infastidire perpetuamente i loro vicini. Alcuni dei pacifisti ci dicono che le frontiere e le divisioni nazionali sono un male perché ci esasperano fino alla guerra. Sarebbe molto più esatto dire che le frontiere e le divisioni nazionali ci mantengono in pace. Sarebbe molto più esatto dire che possiamo sempre amarci l’un l’altro finché non ci vediamo l’un l’altro. Ma il popolo di Gerusalemme è condannato ad avere differenza senza divisione. Sono costretti a porre pilastro contro pilastro nel medesimo tempio, mentre noi possiamo porre città contro città attraverso le pianure del mondo. Mentre per noi una chiesa sorge dalle sue fondamenta con la stessa naturalezza con cui un fiore sboccia da un’aiuola, essi devono benedire il suolo e maledire le pietre che vi stanno sopra. Mentre la terra che amiamo è solida sotto i nostri piedi fino al centro della terra, essi devono vedere tutto ciò che amano e odiano giacere in strati come alternate notte e giorno, incompatibili e inseparabili. I loro intrichi sono tragici, ma non sono da poco né accidentali. Ogni cosa ha un significato; sono leali a grandi nomi come gli uomini sono leali a grandi nazioni; hanno differenze per le quali si sentono tenuti a disputare fino alla morte; ma nella loro morte non sono divisi.
Gerusalemme è una piccola città di grandi cose; e la media città moderna è una grande città piena di piccole cose. Tutte le potenze più importanti e interessanti della storia sono qui raccolte nell’area di un tranquillo villaggio; e se non sono sempre amiche, per lo meno sono necessariamente vicine. Questo è un punto di interesse intellettuale, e persino di intensità, troppo poco compreso. È motivo di lagnanza moderna che in un luogo come Gerusalemme i gruppi cristiani non sempre si guardino l’un l’altro con sentimenti cristiani. Si dice che si combattano l’un l’altro; ma per lo meno si incontrano l’un l’altro. In una grande città industriale come Londra o Liverpool, quanto spesso si incontrano persino l’un l’altro? In una grande città gli uomini vivono in piccole cricche, molto più anguste delle classi; ma in questa piccola città vivono almeno di larghi contatti, anche se sono conflitti. Né è davvero vero, negli umori quotidiani della vita umana, che siano solo conflitti. Ho sentito un eminente ecclesiastico inglese di Cambridge contrattare una lampada d’ottone con un siriano della Chiesa greca, e chiedere consiglio a un frate francescano che stava sorridendo nella stessa bottega. Ho incontrato lo stesso rappresentante della Chiesa d’Inghilterra, a un pranzo con i più scatenati ebrei sionisti, e con il Gran Muftì, il capo della religione musulmana. Supponiamo che lo stesso inglese fosse stato, come ben avrebbe potuto essere, un eloquente e popolare vicario a Chelsea o Hampstead. Quanto spesso avrebbe incontrato un francescano o un sionista? Non una volta l’anno. Quanto spesso avrebbe incontrato un musulmano o un greco siriano? Non una volta in tutta la vita. Anche se fosse un bigotto, sarebbe costretto a Gerusalemme a diventare un tipo di bigotto più interessante. Anche se le sue opinioni fossero anguste, le sue esperienze sarebbero ampie. Egli non è, di fatto, un bigotto, né, di fatto, le altre persone sono bigotte, ma nel peggiore dei casi non potrebbero essere bigotti inconsapevoli. Non potrebbero vivere in una compiacenza così incorretta come è possibile a un più vasto insieme sociale in un più vasto sistema sociale. Non potrebbero essere così ignoranti come una persona di mentalità aperta in un grande sobborgo. In verità c’è qualcosa di fine e distinto nella delicatezza stessa, e persino nell’ironia, delle loro relazioni diplomatiche. C’è qualcosa di cavalleresco nella cortesia della loro tregua armata, ed è una grande scuola di buone maniere quella che include tali differenze nella morale.
This is an aspect of the interest of Jerusalem which can easily be neglected and is not easy to describe. The normal life there is intensely exciting, not because the factions fight, but rather because they do not fight. Of the abnormal crisis when 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 great part of the time that what was picturesque and thrilling was not the war but the peace. The sensation of being in this little town is rather like that of being at a great international congress. It is like that moving and glittering social satire, in which diplomatists can join in a waltz who may soon be joining in a war. For the religious and political parties have yet another point in common with separate nations; that even within this narrow space the complicated curve of their frontiers is really more or 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 Frenchman of the French nation, yet he may no more expect to make a Moslem an Armenian than the Frenchman expects to make an Englishman a Frenchman. If, as we are told, the quarrels could be condemned as merely theological, 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 like the 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 sort of 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 such polished intercourse; including especially two men whose experience and 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 topmost layer of Western officialism, we might indeed find it not inconvenient to 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 his mere presence and history is so strangely picturesque that he might be 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 the Southern and Secessionist army, and still keeps alive in every detail, not merely the virtues but the very gestures of the old Southern and Secessionist aristocrat.
He afterward became a clergyman of the Episcopalian Church, and served as a chaplain in the Spanish-American war, then, at an age when most men have long retired from the most peaceful occupations, he was sent out by President Wilson to the permanent battlefield of Palestine. The brilliant services he performed there, in the protection of British and American subjects, are here chiefly interesting as throwing a backward light on the unearthly topsy-turvydom of Turkish rule. There appears in his experiences something in such rule which we are perhaps apt to forget in a vision of stately Eastern princes and gallant Eastern warriors, something more tyrannical 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 knows whether the Sultan is good or bad, and he gives the same Vizier a thousand pounds or a thousand lashes. I have heard Dr. Glazebrook describe a whole day of hideous hesitation, in which fugitives for whom he pleaded were allowed four times to embark and four times were brought back again to their prison. There is something there dizzy as well as dark, a whirlpool in the very heart of Asia; and something wilder than our own worst oppressions in the peril of 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 sentiment for the white hair of the consul, and the strange respect that many Moslems feel for the minister of any religion. Once at least the trembling rock of barbaric rule nearly fell on him and killed him. By a sudden movement of lawlessness the Turkish military authorities sent 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 against organised Prussia under the full criticism of organised Europe. He was rather standing in a den of brigands, most of whom had never heard of the international rules they violated. Finally by another freak of friendliness they left him and his papers 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 from Palestine and all possibilities that tyranny might return and reign for ever. But I have sometimes fancied that, in that ghastly silence, he may have heard again only the guns of Lee and the last battle in the Wilderness.
Questo è un aspetto dell’interesse di Gerusalemme che può facilmente essere trascurato e non è facile da descrivere. La vita normale là è intensamente eccitante, non perché le fazioni combattano, ma piuttosto perché non combattono. Della crisi anomala in cui combatterono, e degli anomali moventi che le spinsero a combattere, avrò qualcosa da dire più avanti. Ma è stato vero per gran parte del tempo che ciò che era pittoresco ed emozionante non era la guerra ma la pace. La sensazione di trovarsi in questa cittadina è piuttosto simile a quella di essere a un grande congresso internazionale. È come quella commovente e scintillante satira mondana, in cui i diplomatici possono unirsi in un valzer coloro che presto potrebbero unirsi in una guerra. Poiché i partiti religiosi e politici hanno ancora un altro punto in comune con le nazioni separate; che persino entro questo spazio angusto la complicata curva delle loro frontiere è in realtà più o meno fissa, e certamente non particolarmente fluttuante. La persecuzione è impossibile e la conversione non è affatto comune. L’abilissimo capo anglo-cattolico, cui ho già fatto riferimento, mi espresse un paradosso che era una verissima verità pratica. Disse di sentirsi esasperato con le sette cristiane, non per il loro fanatismo ma per la loro mancanza di fanatismo. Intendeva la loro mancanza di qualsiasi fervore e persino di qualsiasi speranza di convertirsi l’un l’altro alle rispettive religioni. Un armeno può essere altrettanto fiero della Chiesa armena quanto un francese della nazione francese, eppure non può aspettarsi di fare di un musulmano un armeno più di quanto il francese si aspetti di fare di un inglese un francese. Se, come ci viene detto, le dispute potessero essere condannate come meramente teologiche, questo sarebbe certamente l’esatto contrario del logico. Ma come dico, ci avviciniamo molto di più a esse chiamandole nazionali; e i capi delle grandi religioni si sentono molto più simili agli ambasciatori di grandi nazioni. E, come ho anche detto, quell’atmosfera ambasciatoriale può essere meglio espressa con la parola ironia, talvolta un’ironia piuttosto tragica. In ogni ricevimento del tè o conversazione per strada, tra i capi rivali, c’è una naturale tendenza a quella sorta di arguzia che consiste in un’allusione velata a un segreto assai palese. Ciascuno sente che ci sono forze pesanti dietro un piccolo punto, come il peso dello schermidore è dietro la punta del fioretto. E il punto può essere ancora più appuntito perché la politica della città, quando vi ero, comprendeva parecchi uomini con il gusto e il talento per un tale forbito commercio; inclusi specialmente due uomini la cui esperienza e cultura sarebbero state notevoli in qualsiasi comunità del mondo; il Console americano e il Governatore Militare di Gerusalemme.
Se nel catalogare gli strati della società prendiamo per primo lo strato più alto dell’ufficialità occidentale, potremmo in effetti trovare non sconveniente prendere questi due uomini come rappresentanti delle principali realtà a suo riguardo. Il dottor Glazebrook, il rappresentante degli Stati Uniti, ha meno a che fare con le questioni interne del paese; ma la sua mera presenza e storia è così stranamente pittoresca che potrebbe essere posta tra le prime ragioni per trovare interessante la città. È ormai un uomo anziano, poiché in realtà cominciò la vita come soldato nell’esercito sudista e secessionista, e conserva ancora vivi in ogni dettaglio, non solo le virtù ma i gesti stessi del vecchio aristocratico sudista e secessionista.
In seguito divenne un ecclesiastico della Chiesa episcopaliana, e servì come cappellano nella guerra ispano-americana, poi, a un’età in cui la maggior parte degli uomini si è da tempo ritirata anche dalle occupazioni più pacifiche, fu inviato dal presidente Wilson nel permanente campo di battaglia della Palestina. I brillanti servigi che vi rese, nella protezione dei sudditi britannici e americani, sono qui interessanti soprattutto perché gettano una luce retrospettiva sull’ultraterreno capovolgimento del dominio turco. Appare nelle sue esperienze qualcosa in tale dominio che forse siamo inclini a dimenticare in una visione di solenni principi orientali e galanti guerrieri orientali, qualcosa di ancora più tirannico persino della cupa testardaggine del prussianesimo. Intendo la più atroce di tutte le torture, che si chiama capriccio. È la cosa che avvertiamo nei racconti arabi, quando nessuno sa se il Sultano sia buono o cattivo, ed egli dà allo stesso Visir mille sterline o mille frustate. Ho sentito il dottor Glazebrook descrivere un’intera giornata di orribile esitazione, in cui a dei fuggitivi per i quali egli intercedeva fu concesso quattro volte di imbarcarsi e quattro volte furono ricondotti alla loro prigione. C’è là qualcosa di vertiginoso oltre che oscuro, un vortice nel cuore stesso dell’Asia; e qualcosa di più selvaggio delle nostre stesse peggiori oppressioni nel pericolo di quegli uomini che alzavano lo sguardo e vedevano al di sopra di tutto il potere delle armi asiatiche, le loro speranze appese a una mente vacillante come quella di un maniaco. Il Tiranno alla fine li lasciò andare, dichiaratamente per un semplice sentimento verso i capelli bianchi del console, e per lo strano rispetto che molti musulmani provano per il ministro di qualsiasi religione. Almeno una volta la tremante roccia del dominio barbarico per poco non gli cadde addosso uccidendolo. Con un improvviso moto di illegalità le autorità militari turche mandarono da lui, esigendo i documenti inglesi lasciati in sua custodia. Egli rifiutò di consegnarli; e sapeva ciò che faceva. Nel tenere fermo non stava nemmeno resistendo come l’Infermiera Cavell contro la Prussia organizzata sotto la piena critica dell’Europa organizzata. Stava piuttosto resistendo in una tana di briganti, la maggior parte dei quali non aveva mai sentito parlare delle regole internazionali che violavano. Infine, per un altro capriccio di cordialità, lasciarono in pace lui e le sue carte sole; ma il vecchio dovette attendere molti giorni nel dubbio, non sapendo cosa avrebbero fatto, poiché non lo sapevano essi stessi. Non so quali fossero i suoi pensieri, o se fossero lontani dalla Palestina e da tutte le possibilità che la tirannia potesse tornare e regnare per sempre. Ma ho talvolta immaginato che, in quel raccapricciante silenzio, egli possa aver udito di nuovo soltanto i cannoni di Lee e l’ultima battaglia nella Wilderness.
If the mention of the American Consul refers back to the oppression of the past, the mention of the Military Governor brings back all the problems of the present. Here I only sketch these groups as I first found them in the present; and it must be remembered that my present is already past. All this was before the latest change from military to civil government, but the mere name of Colonel Storrs raises a question which is rather misunderstood in 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 militarism to a liberal policy akin to parliamentarism. I think this a fallacy, and a fallacy not uncommon in journalism, which is professedly very much up to date, and actually very much behind the times. As a fact it is nearly four years behind the times, for it is thinking in terms of the old small and rigidly professional army. Colonel Storrs is the very last man to be called militaristic in the narrow sense; he is a particularly liberal and enlightened type of the sort of English gentleman who readily served his country in war, but who is rather particularly fitted to serve her in politics or literature. Of course many purely professional soldiers have liberal and artistic tastes; as General Shea, one of the organisers of 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 is now still more strange to forget that most men are soldiers. I fancy there 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 under General Bols at the seat of government on the Mount of Olives, were certainly not narrowed by any military professionalism, and had if anything the mark of quite different professions. One was a very shrewd and 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 all dressed 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 about all these other trades and twenty more. Incidentally, and by way of 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 revived national tongue; whereupon the Governor of Jerusalem finished his Hebrew speech for him—whether to exactly the same effect or not it would be impertinent to inquire. He is a man rather recalling the eighteenth century aristocrat, with his love of wit and classical learning; one of that small group of the governing class that contains his uncle, Harry Cust, and was warmed with the generous culture of George Wyndham. It was a purely mechanical distinction between the military and civil government that would lend 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 English newspapers afterwards is often amusing enough; but I have only mentioned the 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 representative in fact gave place to a system representative in form but financial in fact. That is what the Arabs and many of the English fear; and with the mention of that fear we come to the next stratum after the official. It must be remembered that I am not at this stage 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 call the official head of the Zionists an old friend in a matter quite remote from 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 poor to medical interference to the destruction of all moral independence. He criticised with great effect the proposal of legislators to kidnap anybody else’s child whom they chose to suspect of a feeblemindedness they 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 laws to people whom no sane man would call lunatics. It is as if they were to alter the terms of a quarantine law from “lepers” to “light-haired persons”; and then say blandly that the principle was the same. The humour and human sympathy of a Jewish doctor was very welcome to us when we were accused of being Anti-Semites, and we afterwards asked Dr. Eder for his own views on the Jewish problem. We found he was then a very strong Zionist; and this was long before he had the faintest chance of figuring as a leader of Zionism. And this accident is important; for it stamps the sincerity of the small group of original Zionists, who were in favour of this nationalist ideal when all the international Jewish millionaires were against it. To my mind the most serious point now against it is that the millionaires are for it. But it is enough to note here the reality of the ideal in 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 in the wrong place, which sometimes makes the genuine Zionists unpopular with the English, who themselves suffer unpopularity for supporting them. For though I am called an Anti-Semite, there were really periods of official 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 slaves of the Zionists.
Se la menzione del Console americano rimanda all’oppressione del passato, la menzione del Governatore militare riporta tutti i problemi del presente. Qui mi limito a abbozzare questi gruppi così come dapprima li trovai nel presente; e si deve ricordare che il mio presente è già passato. Tutto ciò avvenne prima dell’ultimo mutamento dal governo militare a quello civile, ma il solo nome del colonnello Storrs solleva una questione piuttosto fraintesa in rapporto a quel mutamento stesso. Molti dei nostri giornalisti, specialmente al tempo dell’ultima e peggiore delle sommosse, scrissero come se dovesse trattarsi d’un passaggio da una sorta di rigido militarismo a una politica liberale affine al parlamentarismo. Io reputo ciò un’illusione, e un’illusione non rara nel giornalismo, il quale si professa quanto mai aggiornato, ed è in realtà quanto mai in ritardo sui tempi. Di fatto è quasi di quattro anni in ritardo sui tempi, poiché ragiona nei termini del vecchio esercito piccolo e rigidamente professionale. Il colonnello Storrs è l’ultimissimo uomo che si possa dire militarista nel senso stretto; è un tipo particolarmente liberale e illuminato di quel genere di gentiluomo inglese che serve prontamente il proprio paese in guerra, ma che è piuttosto particolarmente adatto a servirlo in politica o in letteratura. Naturalmente molti soldati puramente professionali hanno gusti liberali e artistici; come il generale Shea, uno degli organizzatori della vittoria palestinese, ha un fine gusto per la poesia, o il colonnello Popham, allora vice governatore di Gerusalemme, un ammirevole gusto per la pittura. Ma se talvolta si dimentica che molti soldati sono uomini, è ora ancor più strano dimenticare che la maggior parte degli uomini sono soldati. M’immagino che vi siano ora poche cose più rappresentative dell’esercito britannico; certo esso è molto più rappresentativo del Parlamento britannico. Gli uomini che conobbi, e che ricordo con tanta gratitudine, mentre lavoravano sotto il generale Bols alla sede del governo sul Monte degli Ulivi, non erano certo ristretti da alcun professionalismo militare, e recavano semmai l’impronta di professioni assai diverse. Uno era un avvocato assai accorto e spiritoso, impiegato in questioni legali riguardanti la proprietà nemica, un altro era un giovane maestro di scuola, con idee acute e chiare, o piuttosto ideali, sull’educazione di tutte le razze in Palestina. Questi uomini non cessavano d’essere sé stessi perché erano tutti vestiti di kaki; e se il colonnello Storrs ritorna per primo alla memoria, non è perché fosse divenuto colonnello nel mestiere delle armi, ma perché è il genere d’uomo che saprebbe parlare con pari competenza di tutti questi altri mestieri e d’altri venti ancora. Per inciso, e a titolo d’esempio, sa parlarne in una decina di lingue. Vi è un aneddoto, che sia vero o no è quanto mai tipico, secondo cui uno dei capi sionisti tenne un discorso patriottico in ebraico, e s’interruppe di colpo nel richiamare alla mente questa lingua nazionale parzialmente risuscitata; al che il Governatore di Gerusalemme gli terminò il discorso in ebraico — se esattamente col medesimo effetto o no sarebbe impertinente indagare. Egli è un uomo che richiama piuttosto l’aristocratico del diciottesimo secolo, col suo amore per lo spirito e l’erudizione classica; uno di quel piccolo gruppo della classe dirigente che annovera suo zio, Harry Cust, e che fu riscaldato dalla generosa cultura di George Wyndham. Era una distinzione puramente meccanica quella fra il governo militare e quello civile, che presterebbe a simili figure la rigidità d’una corte marziale in campo. E persino coloro che dissentivano da lui lo accusavano in pratica, non d’una militaresca mancanza di simpatia verso alcuno di quelli che governava, ma piuttosto d’una simpatia troppo immaginosa verso taluni di essi. Conoscere queste cose, per quanto lievemente, e poi leggere in seguito i giornali inglesi è spesso abbastanza divertente; ma ho menzionato la faccenda soltanto perché vi è un reale pericolo in una differenziazione tanto grossolana. Sarebbe una cattiva cosa se un sistema militare nella forma ma rappresentativo di fatto cedesse il posto a un sistema rappresentativo nella forma ma finanziario di fatto. È ciò che gli Arabi e molti degli Inglesi temono; e con la menzione di quel timore giungiamo allo strato successivo dopo quello ufficiale. Si deve ricordare che a questo stadio non sto giudicando questi gruppi, ma soltanto abbozzandoli assai rapidamente, come figure e costumi per la strada.
Il gruppo che sta più vicino a quello ufficiale è quello dei Sionisti; i quali si suppone abbiano un posto almeno nella nostra politica ufficiale. Anche tra costoro sono lieto d’avere amici; e posso azzardarmi a chiamare il capo ufficiale dei Sionisti un vecchio amico in una faccenda del tutto remota dal Sionismo. Il dottor Eder, Presidente della Commissione Sionista, è un uomo per il quale concepii un rispetto molto tempo fa, quando protestò, in quanto medico di professione, contro l’assoggettamento dei poveri all’ingerenza medica fino alla distruzione d’ogni indipendenza morale. Egli criticò con grande efficacia la proposta dei legislatori di rapire il figlio di chiunque altro che a loro piacesse sospettare d’una debolezza mentale che essi stessi erano troppo deboli di mente per definire. Fu difesa, in modo assai caratteristico, con una combinazione di precedente e di progresso; e ci fu detto che non faceva che estendere il principio delle leggi sulla follia. Vale a dire, non faceva che estendere il principio delle leggi sulla follia a persone che nessun uomo sano di mente chiamerebbe folli. È come se dovessero mutare i termini d’una legge di quarantena da «lebbrosi» a «persone dai capelli chiari»; e poi dire con disinvoltura che il principio era il medesimo. L’umorismo e l’umana simpatia d’un medico ebreo ci furono quanto mai graditi quando venimmo accusati d’essere Antisemiti, e in seguito chiedemmo al dottor Eder le sue proprie opinioni sul problema ebraico. Trovammo che era allora un Sionista assai convinto; e ciò avveniva molto prima che avesse la benché minima probabilità di figurare come capo del Sionismo. E questo caso è importante; poiché suggella la sincerità del piccolo gruppo dei Sionisti originari, che erano favorevoli a questo ideale nazionalista quando tutti i milionari ebrei internazionali gli erano contrari. A mio avviso il punto più grave ora contro di esso è che i milionari gli sono favorevoli. Ma qui basti notare la realtà dell’ideale in uomini come il dottor Eder e il dottor Weizmann, e senza dubbio molti altri. L’unico difetto che occorra notare, come mero dettaglio di ritratto, è una certa eccessiva vigilanza e gelosia e pertinacia nel posto sbagliato, che talvolta rende i genuini Sionisti impopolari presso gli Inglesi, i quali essi stessi soffrono l’impopolarità per averli sostenuti. Poiché, benché io sia chiamato Antisemita, vi furono davvero periodi d’impazienza ufficiale in cui ero quasi l’unico Filo-semita della compagnia. Andavo in giro a esporre ciò che davvero si poteva dire in favore del Sionismo, a persone che venivano rappresentate dagli Arabi come i meri schiavi dei Sionisti.
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-Semitic than the native Christians. Both are more or less so; and have formed a sort of alliance out of the fact. The banner carried by the mob bore the Arabic inscription “Moslems and Christians are brothers.” It is as if the little wedge of Zionism had closed up the cracks of the Crusades.
Of the Christian crowds in that partnership, and the Christian creeds they 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 order in the stratification of history. It is too often forgotten that in these 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 Byzantine decline than in that Semitic revival. And I will add what I cannot here develop or defend; that in the long run it is best that the Pax Romana should return; and that the suzerainty of those lands at 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 is in that philosophy, for all the talk of its persecutions in the past, a possibility of comprehension and many-sided sympathy which is not 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 Moslem part of the mixed crowds that I chiefly remember; which touches the same truth that the Christians are the more potentially tolerant. But many of the Moslem leaders are as dignified and human as many of the Zionist leaders; the Grand Mufti is a man I cannot imagine as either insulting anybody, or being conceivably the object of insult. The Moslem Mayor of Jerusalem was another such figure, belonging also I believe to one of the Arab aristocratic houses (the Grand Mufti is a descendant of Mahomet) and I shall not forget his first appearance at the first of the riotous meetings in which I found myself. I will give it as the first of two final impressions with which I will end this chapter, I fear on a note of almost anarchic noise, the unearthly beating and braying of the Eastern gongs and horns of two fierce desert faiths against each other.
I first saw from the balcony of the hotel the crowd of riotors come rolling up the street. In front of them went two fantastic figures turning like teetotums in an endless dance and twirling two crooked and 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 Law taking the chair, and Mr. Lloyd George addressing the meeting, Mr. Law and Mr. Lloyd George would only hop and caper in front of a procession, spinning round and round till they were dizzy, and waving and crossing a pair of umbrellas in a thousand invisible patterns. But this political announcement or advertisement, though more intelligent than 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 dance of a religious character. But I could imagine that it might sometimes seem 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 than their bodies. I could imagine that at some moments it might suck the 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 nor the 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 I went downstairs and wedged myself into the thick and thronging press. It surged through the gap by the gate, where men climbed lamp-posts and roared out speeches, and more especially recited national 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 other popular 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 representatives of the Zionists, to take away the Anti-Semitic colour from the meeting. But I think this unlikely; especially as it would have been pretty hard to take it away. It is more likely, I think, that the archaic Jews were really not unamused and perhaps not unsympathetic spectators; for the Zionist problem is complicated by a real quarrel in the Ghetto about Zionism. The old religious Jews do not welcome the new nationalist Jews; it would sometimes be hardly an exaggeration to say that one party stands for the religion without the nation, and the other for the nation without the religion. Just as the old agricultural Arabs hate the Zionists as the instruments of new Western business grab and sharp practice; so the old peddling and pedantic but intensely pious Jews hate the Zionists as the instruments of new Western atheism of free thought. Only I fear that when the storm breaks, such distinctions are swept away.
Questo gruppo di antisemiti arabi può essere considerato per secondo, ma molto brevemente; poiché il problema stesso appartiene a una pagina successiva; e l’unica cosa da dire qui a suo riguardo è molto semplice. Non me l’aspettavo, e nemmeno ora lo comprendo pienamente. Ma è un fatto che i musulmani nativi sono più antisemiti dei cristiani nativi. Entrambi lo sono più o meno; e da questo fatto hanno formato una sorta di alleanza. Lo stendardo portato dalla folla recava l’iscrizione araba «Musulmani e cristiani sono fratelli». È come se il piccolo cuneo del sionismo avesse richiuso le crepe delle Crociate.
Delle folle cristiane in quella partnership, e dei credi cristiani che sono fiere di ereditare, ho già suggerito qualcosa; è solo bene notare che le ho poste fuori dal loro ordine rigoroso nella stratificazione della storia. Troppo spesso si dimentica che in questi paesi la cultura cristiana è più antica della cultura musulmana. Io per primo mi rammarico che la vecchia Pax Romana sia stata spezzata dagli arabi; e sostengo che alla lunga vi fosse più vita in quel declino bizantino che in quella rinascita semitica. E aggiungerò ciò che non posso qui sviluppare o difendere; che alla lunga è meglio che la Pax Romana ritorni; e che la sovranità di quelle terre almeno dovrà essere cristiana, e né musulmana né ebraica. Difenderlo significa difendere una filosofia; ma sostengo davvero che vi sia in quella filosofia, nonostante tutte le chiacchiere sulle sue persecuzioni nel passato, una possibilità di comprensione e di simpatia poliedrica che non è nella stretta intensità né del musulmano né dell’ebreo. Il Cristianesimo è davvero l’angolo retto di quel triangolo, e gli altri due sono angoli molto acuti.
Ma negli incontri che condussero ai tumulti è la parte più musulmana delle folle miste che ricordo soprattutto; il che tocca la stessa verità, che i cristiani sono i più potenzialmente tolleranti. Ma molti dei capi musulmani sono dignitosi e umani quanto molti dei capi sionisti; il Gran Muftì è un uomo che non riesco a immaginare né mentre insulta qualcuno, né come possibile oggetto di insulto. Il sindaco musulmano di Gerusalemme era un’altra figura simile, appartenente anch’egli, credo, a una delle case aristocratiche arabe (il Gran Muftì è un discendente di Maometto) e non dimenticherò la sua prima apparizione al primo dei tumultuosi incontri in cui mi trovai. La darò come la prima di due impressioni finali con cui concluderò questo capitolo, temo su una nota di rumore quasi anarchico, l’ultraterreno battere e strombazzare dei gong e dei corni orientali di due feroci fedi del deserto l’una contro l’altra.
Vidi dapprima dal balcone dell’albergo la folla dei rivoltosi venire rotolando su per la strada. Davanti a loro andavano due figure fantastiche che giravano come trottole in una danza senza fine e roteavano due scimitarre ricurve e nude, come si supponeva che gli irlandesi roteassero i loro shillelagh. Mi parve un modo delizioso di aprire un comizio politico; e avrei voluto che potessimo farlo a casa alle elezioni generali. Vorrei che, invece della tediosa faccenda del signor Bonar Law che assume la presidenza, e del signor Lloyd George che si rivolge all’assemblea, il signor Law e il signor Lloyd George si limitassero a saltellare e a fare capriole davanti a una processione, girando e rigirando su se stessi fino a stordirsi, e agitando e incrociando un paio di ombrelli in mille disegni invisibili. Ma questo annuncio o réclame politica, benché più intelligente della nostra, aveva, come potevo prontamente credere, un altro lato. Mi fu detto che era spesso un preludio a feste ordinarie, come i matrimoni; e senza dubbio rimane da qualche antica danza rituale di carattere religioso. Ma potevo immaginare che talvolta potesse sembrare, a un gusto più razionale, avere un carattere troppo religioso. Potevo immaginare che quegli uomini danzanti potessero in effetti essere dervisci danzanti, con le teste che giravano in un senso più irrazionale dei loro corpi. Potevo immaginare che in certi momenti potesse risucchiare l’anima in ciò che ho chiamato metaforicamente il vortice dell’Asia, o il turbine di un mondo fatto frustare come una trottola con una monotonia furiosa; il ciclone dell’Eternità. Non è quel genere di ritmo né quel genere di religione con cui io stesso spererei di salvare l’anima; ma è intensamente interessante per la mente e persino per l’occhio, e scesi al piano di sotto e mi incuneai nella folla fitta e pigiata. Essa si riversava attraverso il varco presso la porta, dove gli uomini si arrampicavano sui lampioni e sbraitavano discorsi, e specialmente recitavano poemi nazionali con ricche voci risonanti; un effetto davvero commovente, almeno per chi non riusciva a capire una parola di ciò che veniva detto. Il sentimento era già arrivato al punto di far saltare i cappelli agli ebrei e ad altri passatempi popolari, ma non ancora su scala universale e sistematica; vidi alcuni degli antiquati ebrei con rughe e riccioli, scrutare qua e là; alcuni dicevano come spie o rappresentanti dei sionisti, per togliere all’incontro il colore antisemita. Ma credo ciò improbabile; specialmente perché sarebbe stato piuttosto difficile toglierlo. È più probabile, credo, che gli ebrei arcaici fossero in realtà spettatori non poco divertiti e forse non poco solidali; poiché il problema sionista è complicato da una vera disputa nel Ghetto a proposito del sionismo. I vecchi ebrei religiosi non danno il benvenuto ai nuovi ebrei nazionalisti; talvolta non sarebbe quasi un’esagerazione dire che un partito rappresenta la religione senza la nazione, e l’altro la nazione senza la religione. Proprio come i vecchi arabi agricoltori odiano i sionisti come strumenti del nuovo arraffare affaristico occidentale e delle pratiche disoneste; così i vecchi ebrei ambulanti e pedanti ma intensamente pii odiano i sionisti come strumenti del nuovo ateismo occidentale del libero pensiero. Solo che temo che quando la tempesta scoppierà, tali distinzioni siano spazzate via.
The storm was certainly rising. Outside the Jaffa Gate the road runs 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 stage properties, its one high-curtained window and balcony, with a sort of pole or flag-staff; for the place is official or rather municipal. Round it swelled the crowd, with its songs and poems and passionate rhetoric in a kind of crescendo, and then suddenly the curtain of the window rose like the curtain of the theatre, and we saw on that high balcony the red fez and the tall figure of the Mahometan Mayor of Jerusalem.
I did not understand his Arabic observations; but I know when 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 away in a grey morning; but there are perpetual mutterings of that storm. My point for the moment is that the exasperations come chiefly from the two extremes of the two great Semitic traditions of monotheism; and certainly not primarily from those poor Eastern Christians of whose fanaticism we have been taught to make fun. From time to time there are gleams of the extremities of Eastern fanaticism which are almost ghastly to Western feeling. They seem to crack the polish of the dignified leaders of the Arab aristocracy and the Zionist school of culture, and reveal a volcanic 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 doctors to let them die and hospitals to let them rot, ringing with the old unmistakable and awful accent that bade men dash their children against the stones. Another day the city would be placarded with posters printed in Damascus, telling the Jews who looked to Palestine for a national home that they should find it a national cemetery. And when these cries clash it is like the clash of those two crooked Eastern swords, that crossed and recrossed and revolved like blazing wheels, in the vanguard of the marching mob.
I felt the fullest pressure of the problem when I first walked round the 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 was laden with a storm that became the snowstorm; and it was the time at which the old Jews beat their hands and mourn over what are believed to be the last stones of the Temple. There was a movement in my own mind that was attuned to these things, and impressed by the 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 this chapter 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 of the Mosque of Omar. There is no place for the nation of the Jews but in the country of the Arabs. And these whispers came to me first not as intellectual conclusions upon the conditions of the case, of which I should have much more to say and to hope; but rather as hints of something immediate and menacing and yet mysterious. I felt almost a momentary impulse to flee from the place, like one who 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 crying from the turret and Israel wailing at the wall.
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La tempesta stava certo montando. Fuori della Porta di Giaffa la strada sale ripida ed è spaccata in due dal cuneo di un alto edificio, che pare stretto come una torre e sporge come la prua di una nave. Vi è qualcosa di quasi teatrale nella sua posizione e nella sua scenografia, la sua unica alta finestra a tendaggi e il balcone, con una sorta di pertica o asta di bandiera; ché il luogo è ufficiale, o piuttosto municipale. Intorno si gonfiava la folla, coi suoi canti e poemi e la sua appassionata retorica in una specie di crescendo, e poi d’un tratto la tenda della finestra si sollevò come il sipario del teatro, e vedemmo su quell’alto balcone il fez rosso e l’alta figura del Sindaco maomettano di Gerusalemme.
Non compresi le sue osservazioni in arabo; ma so riconoscere quando un uomo sta calmando una folla, e la folla si fece davvero più calma. Fu come se una tempesta si fosse gonfiata nella notte e si spegnesse a poco a poco in un grigio mattino; ma vi sono perpetui brontolii di quella tempesta. Il mio punto, per il momento, è che le esasperazioni provengono soprattutto dai due estremi delle due grandi tradizioni semitiche del monoteismo; e certo non in primo luogo da quei poveri cristiani d’Oriente del cui fanatismo ci hanno insegnato a farci beffe. Di tanto in tanto vi sono lampi degli estremi del fanatismo orientale che sono quasi spaventosi al sentire occidentale. Sembrano incrinare la lucidatura dei dignitosi capi dell’aristocrazia araba e della scuola di cultura sionista, e rivelano una sostanza vulcanica di cui sono stati fatti soltanto i credi orientali. Un giorno un selvaggio proclama ebraico passa di mano in mano, denunciando gli ebrei sleali che rifiutano di insegnare l’ebraico; dicendo ai medici di lasciarli morire e agli ospedali di lasciarli marcire, risonante di quell’antico, inconfondibile e terribile accento che comandava agli uomini di sfracellare i loro figli contro le pietre. Un altro giorno la città è tappezzata di manifesti stampati a Damasco, che dicono agli ebrei i quali guardavano alla Palestina come a una patria nazionale, che vi troveranno un cimitero nazionale. E quando questi gridi cozzano, è come il cozzare di quelle due ricurve spade orientali che si incrociavano e si reincrociavano e roteavano come ruote fiammeggianti, all’avanguardia della folla in marcia.
Sentii la piena pressione del problema quando per la prima volta girai attorno all’intero recinto dell’Haram, i cortili dell’antico Tempio, dove le alte torri dei muezzin sorgono ora a ogni angolo, e udii le chiare voci del richiamo alla preghiera. Il cielo era greve di una tempesta che divenne la bufera di neve; ed era l’ora in cui i vecchi ebrei battono le mani e piangono su quelle che si crede siano le ultime pietre del Tempio. Vi era nella mia stessa mente un moto che si accordava a queste cose, e che era colpito dagli stretti limiti e dai ripidi fianchi di quella piattaforma dei monti; poiché il senso della crisi non sta solo nell’intensità degli ideali, ma nelle condizioni stesse della realtà, la realtà con cui questo capitolo si è aperto. E il suo peso è il peso della Palestina; l’angustia dei confini e la stratificazione della roccia. Una voce, non della mia ragione ma piuttosto risonante pesantemente nel mio cuore, sembrava ripetere frasi simili a proverbi pessimistici. Non c’è posto per il Tempio di Salomone se non sulle rovine della Moschea di Omar. Non c’è posto per la nazione degli ebrei se non nel paese degli arabi. E questi sussurri mi giunsero dapprima non come conclusioni intellettuali sulle condizioni del caso, di cui avrei molto altro da dire e da sperare; ma piuttosto come accenni di qualcosa di immediato e minaccioso eppure misterioso. Sentii quasi un momentaneo impulso a fuggire dal luogo, come chi ha ricevuto un presagio. Poiché due voci si erano incontrate nelle mie orecchie; e nel medesimo stretto spazio e nella medesima buia ora, elettrica eppure eclissata di nubi, avevo udito l’Islam gridare dalla torretta e Israele lamentarsi al muro.
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CHAPTER VII
THE SHADOW OF THE PROBLEM
A traveller sees the hundred branches of a tree long before he is near enough to see its single and simple root; he generally sees the scattered or sprawling suburbs of a town long before he has looked upon the temple or the market-place. So far I have given impressions of the most motley things merely as they came, in chronological and not in logical order; the first flying vision of Islam as a sort of sea, with something both of the equality and the emptiness and the grandeur of its purple seas of sand; the first sharp silhouette of Jerusalem, like Mount St. Michael, lifting above that merely Moslem flood a crag still crowned with the towers of the Crusaders; the mere kaleidoscope of the streets, with little more than a hint of the heraldic meaning of the colours; a merely personal impression of 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 much of a hurry about tidying up. This has already been noted in the more obvious case, of all that religious art that bewildered the tourist with its churches full of flat and gilded ikons. Many a man has had the sensation of something as full as a picture gallery and as futile as a lumber-room, merely by not happening to know what is really of value, or especially in what way it is really valued. An Armenian or a Syrian might write a report on his visit to England, saying that our national and especially our naval heroes 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 of social status and utility implied in a public-house sign. He might not realise that the sign of Nelson could be hung on high everywhere, because the reputation of Nelson was high everywhere, not because it was low anywhere; that his bad portrait was really a proof of his good name. Yet the too rapid reformer may easily miss even the simple and superficial parallel between the wooden pictures 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 fond of religion as Englishmen of beer.
Nobody can do justice to these cults who has not some sympathy with the power of a mystical idea to transmute the meanest and most trivial objects with a kind of magic. It is easy to talk of superstitiously attaching importance to sticks and stones, but the whole poetry of life consists of attaching importance to sticks and stones; and not only to those tall sticks we call the trees or those large stones we call the mountains. Anything that gives to the sticks of our own furniture, or the stones of our own backyard, even a reflected or indirect divinity is good for the dignity of life; and this is often achieved by the dedication of similar and special things. At least we should desire to see the profane things transfigured by 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 bowls before the altar, and on every pot in Jerusalem should be written Holy 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 fact of the Armenians or some such people having been allowed to suspend a string of lamps from a Greek pillar by means of a nail, and their subsequent alarm when their nail was washed by the owners of the pillar; a sort of symbol that their nail had finally fallen into the hands of the enemy. It strikes us as odd that a nail should be so valuable or 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 or even for superstition, is obvious and has already been observed. But before leaving it, we may note that the same argument cuts the other way; I mean that we should not insolently impose our own ideas of 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 on the whole reasonable and sympathetic; but there is always a 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 must not 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 are really authorities, so they are the only judges of whether their novelties are really necessities. As I pointed out more than once to many of my friends in Jerusalem, we should be very much annoyed if artistic visitors from Asia took similar liberties in London. It would be bad enough if they proposed to conduct excavations in Pimlico or Paddington, without much reference to the people who lived there; but it would be worse if they began to relieve them of the mere utilitarianism of Chelsea Bridge or Paddington Station. Suppose an eloquent Abyssinian Christian were to hold up his hand and stop the motor-omnibuses from going down Fleet Street on the ground that the 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 are in the act of stepping into a taxi-cab, an excitable Coptic Christian were to leap from behind a lamp-post, and implore us to save the grand old growler or the cab called the gondola of London. I admit and enjoy the poetry of the hansom; I admit and enjoy the personality of the true cabman of the old four-wheeler, upon whose massive manhood descended something of the tremendous tradition of 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-book of 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 saw any 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 would be likely to agree. I have therefore confined the first section of this book to a mere series of such impressions, and left to the last section 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 me the determining historical events that make the problem what it is. Of these I will only say for the moment that, whether by a coincidence or for some deeper cause, I feel it myself to be a case of first thoughts being best; and that some further study of history served rather 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 fix the fugitive fancy which had seen, in the snow on the city, the white crown of a woman of Bethlehem.
CAPITOLO VII
L’OMBRA DEL PROBLEMA
Un viaggiatore vede i cento rami di un albero molto prima di essere abbastanza vicino da vederne l’unica e semplice radice; generalmente vede i sobborghi sparsi o disordinati di una città molto prima di aver posato lo sguardo sul tempio o sulla piazza del mercato. Finora ho dato impressioni delle cose più eterogenee semplicemente come venivano, in ordine cronologico e non logico; la prima fugace visione dell’Islam come una sorta di mare, con qualcosa dell’uguaglianza e del vuoto e della grandiosità dei suoi purpurei mari di sabbia; la prima nitida sagoma di Gerusalemme, come Mont Saint-Michel, che si leva sopra quella marea meramente musulmana come una rupe ancora coronata dalle torri dei Crociati; il mero caleidoscopio delle strade, con poco più di un accenno al significato araldico dei colori; una impressione meramente personale di alcune delle figure di spicco che mi capitò di incontrare per prime, e solo la più tenue suggestione dei gruppi che esse rappresentavano. Finora non ho nemmeno riordinato le mie prime impressioni del luogo; tanto meno avanzato un piano per riordinare il luogo stesso.
In ogni caso, per cominciare, è facile avere troppa fretta di riordinare. Ciò è già stato notato nel caso più ovvio, di tutta quell’arte religiosa che sconcertava il turista con le sue chiese piene di piatte e dorate icone. Più d’un uomo ha avuto la sensazione di qualcosa di pieno come una galleria di quadri e di futile come un ripostiglio, semplicemente per il fatto di non sapere che cosa abbia realmente valore, o specialmente in quale modo sia realmente valutato. Un armeno o un siriano potrebbe scrivere un resoconto della sua visita in Inghilterra, dicendo che i nostri eroi nazionali e specialmente navali erano trascurati, e lasciati alla più bassa feccia della plebaglia; poiché i ritratti di Benbow e Nelson, quando esposti al pubblico, erano dipinti su legno dai più rozzi e incompetenti artisti. Egli forse non apprezzerebbe pienamente la fine sfumatura di status sociale e di utilità implicita in un’insegna di public casa. Potrebbe non rendersi conto che l’insegna di Nelson poteva essere appesa in alto ovunque, perché la reputazione di Nelson era alta ovunque, non perché fosse bassa in qualche luogo; che il suo cattivo ritratto era in realtà una prova del suo buon nome. Eppure il riformatore troppo rapido può facilmente mancare persino il semplice e superficiale parallelo tra i ritratti lignei degli ammiragli e i ritratti lignei degli angeli. Ancor meno apprezzerà l’intensa atmosfera spirituale, che fa la vera differenza tra un’icona e un’insegna d’osteria, e rende le locande d’Inghilterra, nobili e nazionali quali sono, relativamente le dimore della carità cristiana ma difficilmente di una fede cristiana. Egli riesce a stento a convincersi che i siriani possano essere tanto affezionati alla religione quanto gli inglesi alla birra.
Nessuno può rendere giustizia a questi culti se non ha una qualche simpatia per il potere di un’idea mistica di trasmutare gli oggetti più vili e più banali con una sorta di magia. È facile parlare dell’attribuire superstiziosamente importanza a bastoni e pietre, ma tutta la poesia della vita consiste nell’attribuire importanza a bastoni e pietre; e non solo a quegli alti bastoni che chiamiamo alberi o a quelle grandi pietre che chiamiamo montagne. Qualsiasi cosa che dia ai bastoni dei nostri mobili, o alle pietre del nostro cortile, anche una divinità riflessa o indiretta, è un bene per la dignità della vita; e ciò si ottiene spesso con la dedicazione di cose simili e speciali. Almeno dovremmo desiderare di vedere le cose profane trasfigurate dal sacro, piuttosto che il sacro disincantato dal profano; e fu un profeta, camminando sulle mura di questa città montana, a dire che nella sua visione tutte le coppe sarebbero state come le coppe davanti all’altare, e su ogni pentola in Gerusalemme sarebbe stato scritto: Santo al Signore.
Comunque, questa intensità riguardo alle piccole cose non è sempre compresa. Parecchi inglesi del tutto benevoli mi raccontarono come una semplice storiella buffa (e Dio non voglia che io neghi che sia buffa) il fatto che agli armeni o a qualche popolo simile fosse stato permesso di sospendere una fila di lampade da un pilastro greco per mezzo di un chiodo, e il loro successivo allarme quando il loro chiodo fu lavato dai proprietari del pilastro; una sorta di simbolo che il loro chiodo fosse infine caduto nelle mani del nemico. Ci colpisce come strano che un chiodo possa essere così prezioso o così vivido per l’immaginazione. Eppure, per uomini così vicini al Calvario, persino i chiodi non sono del tutto comuni.
Tutto ciò, riguardo a un decoroso indugio e rispetto per la religione o persino per la superstizione, è ovvio ed è già stato osservato. Ma prima di lasciarlo, possiamo notare che lo stesso argomento taglia nell’altro senso; intendo che non dovremmo imporre insolentemente le nostre idee di ciò che è pittoresco più di quanto imponiamo le nostre idee di ciò che è pratico. L’esteta è talvolta più vandalo del vandalo. Le proposte ricostruzioni di Gerusalemme sono state nel complesso ragionevoli e comprensive; ma c’è sempre un pericolo nelle attività, potrei quasi dire nelle buffonate, di una sorta di antiquario che è più precipitoso di un anarchico. Se il popolo di tali luoghi si ribella contro i propri limiti, dobbiamo avere un ragionevole rispetto per la loro rivolta, e non dobbiamo essere impazienti nemmeno con la loro impazienza.
È la loro città; sono loro a doverci vivere, non noi. Come sono i soli giudici del se le loro antichità siano davvero autorità, così sono i soli giudici del se le loro novità siano davvero necessità. Come ho fatto notare più di una volta a molti dei miei amici a Gerusalemme, saremmo assai infastiditi se visitatori artistici dall’Asia si prendessero simili libertà a Londra. Sarebbe già abbastanza brutto se proponessero di condurre scavi a Pimlico o Paddington, senza troppo riguardo per le persone che vi abitano; ma sarebbe peggio se cominciassero a liberarle del mero utilitarismo del Chelsea Bridge o della stazione di Paddington. Supponiamo che un eloquente cristiano abissino alzasse la mano e fermasse gli autobus a motore dallo scendere per Fleet Street col pretesto che la via fosse sacra alla più semplice locomozione del dottor Johnson. Saremmo lieti dell’apprezzamento dell’africano per Johnson; ma il nostro piacere non sarebbe scevro di sfumature. Supponiamo che, mentre voi o io siamo nell’atto di salire su un taxi, un eccitabile cristiano copto balzasse da dietro un lampione, e ci implorasse di salvare il vecchio e grandioso ringhiatore o la carrozza chiamata la gondola di Londra. Ammetto e godo la poesia del hansom; ammetto e godo la personalità del vero vetturino della vecchia carrozza a quattro ruote, sulla cui massiccia virilità discese qualcosa della tremenda tradizione di Tony Weller. Ma non sono così certo come vorrei essere, che in quel momento godrei della personalità del copto. Per queste ragioni sembra davvero desiderabile, o almeno difendibile, differire ogni prematura ricostruzione delle cose contese, e cominciare questo libro come un mero taccuino o album di schizzi delle cose come sono, o in ogni caso come appaiono. Fu in questo ordine irregolare, e in questa illogica sproporzione, che le cose di fatto mi apparvero, e passò un po’ di tempo prima che vedessi una qualche vera generalizzazione che riducesse a ordine le mie impressioni. Vidi che i gruppi erano in disaccordo, e in una certa misura perché erano in disaccordo, molto prima di poter seriamente considerare qualcosa su cui fosse probabile che concordassero. Ho perciò confinato la prima sezione di questo libro a una mera serie di tali impressioni, e ho lasciato all’ultima sezione uno studio del problema e un tentativo di soluzione. Tra queste due ho inserito una sorta di schizzo di quelli che mi parvero gli eventi storici determinanti che rendono il problema ciò che è. Di questi dirò solo per il momento che, sia per una coincidenza sia per qualche causa più profonda, sento io stesso che è un caso in cui i primi pensieri sono i migliori; e che qualche ulteriore studio della storia servì piuttosto a solidificare ciò che era sembrato una mera sorta di visione. Potrei quasi dire che mi innamorai di Gerusalemme a prima vista; e l’impressione finale, giusta o sbagliata, servì solo a fissare la fuggevole fantasia che aveva visto, nella neve sulla città, la bianca corona di una donna di Betlemme.
But there is another cause for my being content for the moment, with this mere chaos of contrasts. There is a very real reason for emphasising those contrasts, and for shunning the temptation to shut our eyes to them even considered as contrasts. It is necessary to insist that the contrasts are not easy to turn into combinations; that the red robes of Rome and the green scarves of Islam will not very easily fade into a dingy russet; that the gold of Byzantium and the brass of Babylon will require a hot furnace to melt them into any kind of amalgam. The reason for this is akin to what has already been said about Jerusalem as a knot of realities. It is especially a knot of popular realities. Although it is so small a place, or rather because it is so small 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 has grown large enough to have despots; indeed the despots are often much the more representative of the two. Now in a place so small as Jerusalem, what we call the rank and file really counts. And it is generally true, in religions especially, that the real enthusiasm or even fanaticism is to be found in the rank and file. In all intense religions it is the poor who are more religious and the rich who are more irreligious. It is certainly so with the creeds and causes that come to a collision in Jerusalem. The great Jewish population throughout the world did hail Mr. Balfour’s declaration with something almost of the tribal triumph they might have shown when the Persian conqueror broke the Babylonian bondage. It was rather the plutocratic princes of Jewry who long hung back and hesitated about Zionism. The mass of Mahometans really are ready to combine against the Zionists as they might have combined against the Crusades. It is rather the responsible Mahometan leaders who will naturally be found more moderate and diplomatic. This popular spirit may take a good or a bad form; and a mob may cry out 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 moderate admixture of Popery.” It shouts “Three cheers for Gladstone,” it does not shout “A gradual and evolutionary social tendency towards some ideal similar to that of Gladstone.” It would find it quite a difficult thing to shout; and it would find exactly the same difficulty with all the advanced formulae about nationalisation and internationalisation and class-conscious solidarity. No rabble could roar at the top of its voice the collectivist formula of “The nationalisation of all the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” The mob of Jerusalem is no exception 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 was a 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 idolatry of education. Their powers appeared in every crisis of the Great War, when a small group of pacifists and internationalists, a microscopic minority in every country, were yet constantly figuring as diplomatists and intermediaries and men on whose attitude great issues might depend. A man like Mr. Macdonald, not a workman nor a formal or real representative of workmen, was followed everywhere by the limelight; while the millions of workmen who worked and fought were out of focus and therefore looked like a fog. Just as such figures give a fictitious impression of unity between the crowds fighting for different flags and frontiers, so there are similar figures giving a fictitious unity to the crowds following different creeds. There are already Moslems who are Modernists; there have always been a ruling class of Jews who are Materialists. Perhaps it would be true to say about much of the philosophical controversy in Europe, that many Jews tend to be Materialists, but all tend to be Monists, though the best in the sense of being Monotheists. The worst are in a much grosser sense materialists, and have motives very 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 creeds as they do the chasm between countries. Everywhere they exalt the minority that is indifferent over the majority that is interested. Just as they would make an international congress out of the traitors of all nations, so they would make an ecumenical council out of the heretics of all religions.
Mild constitutionalists in our own country often discuss the 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 is difficult 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 all the poor Jews who do believe in Judaism and all the Mahometans who do believe in Mahometanism, not to mention so obscure a crowd as the Christians who do believe in Christianity. I feel I have more morally and even intellectually in common with these people, and even the religions of these people, than with the supercilious negations that make up the most part of what is called enlightenment. It is these masses whom we ought to consider everywhere; but it is especially these masses whom we must consider in Jerusalem. And the reason is in the reality I have described; that the place is like a Greek city or a medieval parish; it is sufficiently small and simple to be a democracy. This is not a university town full of philosophies; it is a Zion of the hundred sieges raging with religions; not a place where resolutions can be voted and amended, but a place where men can be crowned and crucified.
Ma c’è un’altra ragione per cui mi accontento, per il momento, di questo mero caos di contrasti. C’è una ragione molto reale per sottolineare quei contrasti, e per rifuggire la tentazione di chiudervi gli occhi persino considerandoli come contrasti. È necessario insistere sul fatto che i contrasti non sono facili da trasformare in combinazioni; che le rosse vesti di Roma e le verdi sciarpe dell’Islam non sfumeranno molto facilmente in un sudicio rossiccio; che l’oro di Bisanzio e l’ottone di Babilonia richiederanno una fornace ardente per fonderli in una qualsiasi sorta di amalgama. La ragione di ciò è affine a quanto è già stato detto di Gerusalemme come un nodo di realtà. È soprattutto un nodo di realtà popolari. Benché sia un luogo così piccolo, o piuttosto perché è un luogo così piccolo, è un dominio e un’egemonia per le masse. La Democrazia non è mai del tutto democratica se non quando è del tutto diretta; e non è mai del tutto diretta se non quando è del tutto piccola. Non appena una folla è cresciuta abbastanza da avere delegati è cresciuta abbastanza da avere despoti; anzi i despoti sono spesso i più rappresentativi dei due. Ora, in un luogo così piccolo come Gerusalemme, ciò che chiamiamo la massa conta davvero. Ed è generalmente vero, nelle religioni specialmente, che il vero entusiasmo o persino fanatismo si trova nella massa. In tutte le religioni intense sono i poveri a essere più religiosi e i ricchi a essere più irreligiosi. È certamente così con i credi e le cause che vengono a collisione a Gerusalemme. La grande popolazione ebraica di tutto il mondo salutò davvero la dichiarazione del signor Balfour con qualcosa di quasi simile al trionfo tribale che avrebbe potuto mostrare quando il conquistatore persiano spezzò la schiavitù babilonese. Furono piuttosto i principi plutocratici della Giudea a esitare a lungo e a tentennare riguardo al sionismo. La massa dei maomettani è davvero pronta a coalizzarsi contro i sionisti come avrebbe potuto coalizzarsi contro le Crociate. Sono piuttosto i responsabili capi maomettani che naturalmente si troveranno più moderati e diplomatici. Questo spirito popolare può assumere una forma buona o cattiva; e una folla può gridare molte cose, giuste e sbagliate. Ma una folla grida «Niente papismo»; non grida «Non tanto papismo», e ancor meno «Solo una moderata mescolanza di papismo». Grida «Tre urrà per Gladstone», non grida «Una graduale ed evolutiva tendenza sociale verso qualche ideale simile a quello di Gladstone». Troverebbe assai difficile gridarlo; e troverebbe esattamente la stessa difficoltà con tutte le formule avanzate sulla nazionalizzazione e l’internazionalizzazione e la solidarietà di classe. Nessuna plebaglia potrebbe ruggire a squarciagola la formula collettivista della «nazionalizzazione di tutti i mezzi di produzione, distribuzione e scambio». La folla di Gerusalemme non fa eccezione alla regola, ma ne è piuttosto un esempio estremo. La folla di Gerusalemme ha gridato alcune cose notevoli ai suoi tempi; ma non erano pedanti e non erano evasive. Ci fu un giorno in cui gridò una sola parola: «Crocifiggi». Fu una cosa da oscurare il sole e squarciare il velo del tempio; ma non c’era alcun dubbio su ciò che significava.
Questa è un’epoca di minoranze; di minoranze potenti e predominanti, in parte attraverso il potere della ricchezza e in parte attraverso l’idolatria dell’istruzione. I loro poteri apparvero in ogni crisi della Grande Guerra, quando un piccolo gruppo di pacifisti e internazionalisti, una minoranza microscopica in ogni paese, figurava tuttavia costantemente come diplomatici e intermediari e uomini dal cui atteggiamento potevano dipendere grandi questioni. Un uomo come il signor Macdonald, non un operaio né un rappresentante formale o reale degli operai, era seguito ovunque dalle luci della ribalta; mentre i milioni di operai che lavoravano e combattevano erano fuori fuoco e perciò sembravano una nebbia. Proprio come tali figure danno una fittizia impressione di unità tra le folle che combattono per bandiere e frontiere diverse, così ci sono figure simili che danno una fittizia unità alle folle che seguono credi diversi. Ci sono già musulmani che sono modernisti; c’è sempre stata una classe dirigente di ebrei che sono materialisti. Forse sarebbe vero dire, di gran parte della controversia filosofica in Europa, che molti ebrei tendono a essere materialisti, ma tutti tendono a essere monisti, benché i migliori nel senso di essere monoteisti. I peggiori sono materialisti in un senso molto più grossolano, e hanno moventi assai diversi dal secco idealismo di uomini come il signor Macdonald, che è probabilmente abbastanza sincero a suo modo. Ma con qualsiasi movente, questi intermediari ovunque gettano un ponte sull’abisso tra i credi come fanno sull’abisso tra i paesi. Ovunque esaltano la minoranza che è indifferente sopra la maggioranza che è interessata. Proprio come farebbero un congresso internazionale con i traditori di tutte le nazioni, così farebbero un concilio ecumenico con gli eretici di tutte le religioni.
I miti costituzionalisti nel nostro paese discutono spesso la possibilità di un metodo per proteggere la minoranza. Se troveranno un qualsiasi metodo possibile per proteggere la maggioranza, avranno trovato qualcosa di praticamente ignoto al mondo moderno. La maggioranza è sempre in svantaggio; la maggioranza è difficile da idealizzare, perché è difficile da immaginare. La minoranza è generalmente idealizzata, talvolta dai suoi servitori, sempre da se stessa. Ma le mie simpatie sono generalmente, lo confesso, con l’impotente e persino invisibile maggioranza. E le mie simpatie, quando vado oltre le cose in cui io stesso credo, sono con tutti i poveri ebrei che credono davvero nel giudaismo e con tutti i maomettani che credono davvero nel maomettanismo, per non parlare di una folla tanto oscura come i cristiani che credono davvero nel Cristianesimo. Sento di avere più in comune moralmente e persino intellettualmente con questa gente, e persino con le religioni di questa gente, che con le sdegnose negazioni che costituiscono la maggior parte di ciò che si chiama illuminismo. Sono queste masse che dovremmo considerare ovunque; ma sono specialmente queste masse che dobbiamo considerare a Gerusalemme. E la ragione sta nella realtà che ho descritto; che il luogo è come una città greca o una parrocchia medievale; è sufficientemente piccolo e semplice da essere una democrazia. Questa non è una città universitaria piena di filosofie; è una Sion dei cento assedi che ribolle di religioni; non un luogo dove le risoluzioni possono essere votate ed emendate, ma un luogo dove gli uomini possono essere incoronati e crocifissi.
There is one small thing neglected in all our talk about self-determination; and that is determination. There is a great deal more difference than there is between most motions and amendments between the things for which a democracy will vote and the things on which a democracy is determined. You can take a vote among Jews and Christians and Moslems about whether lamp-posts should be painted green or portraits of politicians painted at all, and even their solid unanimity may be solid indifference. Most of what is called self-determination is like that; but there is 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 rather three 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 vague parliamentary election, to vote on the other side for a change, to choose afresh between two middle-class gentlemen, who look exactly alike and only 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 cannot be foreseen and certainly cannot be enforced. We cannot enrol these 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 only by being irreligious. That is why I willingly set down for the moment only 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 habit of thinking it a familiar country. It does no harm to put the facts in a fashion that seems disconnected; for the first fact of all is that they are disconnected. And the first danger of all is that we may allow some international nonsense or newspaper cant to imply that 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 learn in this strange land is that differences can be irreconcilable. And again the chief danger is that they may be persuaded that the wordy compromises of Western politics can reconcile them; that such abysses can 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 a certain point be workable in England; though there are signs that even in England that point is approaching or is past. But in any case we could 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 from ourselves and from each other we have at least partly succeeded. So in Ireland, where we have tried to make them agree with us and each other, we have made one never-ending nightmare.
We can no more subject the world to the English compromise than to the English climate; and both are things of incalculable cloud and twilight. We have grown used to a habit of calling things by the wrong names and supporting them by the wrong arguments; and even doing the right thing for the wrong cause. We have party governments which consist of people who pretend to agree when they really disagree. We have party debates which consist of people who pretend to disagree when they really agree. We have whole parties named after things they no longer support, or things they would never dream of proposing. We have a mass of meaningless parliamentary ceremonials that are no longer even symbolic; the rule by which a parliamentarian possesses a constituency but not a surname; or the rule by which he becomes a minister in order to cease to be a member. All this would seem the most superstitious and idolatrous mummery 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 Greek may or may not have a right to say he is Orthodox, but he means that he is Orthodox; in a very different sense from that in which a 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 because he is a Liberal, and a particular supporter of the party of liberty. Even in England indeed it will generally be found that there is something more clear and rational about the terms of theology than those of politics and popular science. A man has at least a more logical notion of what he means when he calls himself an Anglo-Catholic than when he calls himself an Anglo-Saxon. But the old Jew with the drooping ringlets, shuffling in and out of the little black booths of Jerusalem, would not condescend to 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 thunder and with miracles and with mighty battles out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage. In other words, he says something that means something, and something that he really means. One of the white Dominicans or brown Franciscans, from the great monasteries of the Holy City, may or may not be right in maintaining that a Papacy is necessary to the unity of Christendom. But he does not pass his life in proving that the Papacy is not a Papacy, as many of our liberal constitutionalists pass it in proving that the Monarchy is not a Monarchy. The Greek priests spend an hour on what seems to the sceptic mere meaningless formalities of the preparation of the Mass. But they would not spend a minute if they were themselves sceptics and thought them meaningless formalities, as most modern people do think of the formalities about Black Rod or the Bar of the House. They would be far less ritualistic than we are, if they cared as little for the Mass as we do for the Mace. Hence it is necessary for us to realise that these rude and simple worshippers, of all the different forms of worship, really would be bewildered by the ritual dances and elaborate ceremonial antics of John Bull, as by the superstitious forms and almost supernatural incantations of most of what we call plain English.
C’è una piccola cosa trascurata in tutti i nostri discorsi sull’autodeterminazione; ed è la determinazione. Vi è ben più differenza di quanta ve ne sia tra la maggior parte delle mozioni e degli emendamenti, tra le cose per cui una democrazia voterà e le cose su cui una democrazia è determinata. Potete indire un voto tra Ebrei, Cristiani e Musulmani sul se i lampioni debbano essere dipinti di verde o se i ritratti dei politici debbano essere dipinti affatto, e persino la loro solida unanimità può essere solida indifferenza. La maggior parte di ciò che si chiama autodeterminazione è così; ma non vi è in essa alcuna autodeterminazione. Il popolo non è determinato. Non si può indire un voto quando il popolo è determinato. Si accetta un voto, o qualcosa di ben più evidente di un voto.
Ora, può darsi che a Gerusalemme non vi sia un solo popolo ma piuttosto tre o quattro; ma ciascuno è un popolo reale, con la propria opinione pubblica, la propria politica pubblica, la propria bandiera e quasi, come ho detto, la propria frontiera. Non è questione di persuadere elettori deboli e incerti, in una vaga elezione parlamentare, a votare per l’altra parte tanto per cambiare, a scegliere di nuovo tra due gentiluomini borghesi, che si somigliano in tutto e per tutto e differiscono solo su una questione di cui nessuno sa nulla né gli importa nulla. È questione di contrasti che quasi certamente rimarranno contrasti, salvo sotto la piena di qualche conversione spirituale che non può essere prevista e certamente non può essere imposta. Non possiamo arruolare questa gente sotto la nostra religione, perché non ne abbiamo una. Possiamo arruolarli sotto il nostro governo, e se siamo obbligati a farlo, l’essenziale ovvio è che, come il dominio romano prima del Cristianesimo, o il dominio inglese in India, esso professi di essere imparziale non foss’altro che con l’essere irreligioso. Ecco perché per il momento metto volentieri per iscritto soltanto le prime impressioni di uno straniero in un paese straniero. È perché la nostra prima salvezza sta nel vedere che è un paese straniero; e il nostro presente pericolo preliminare è che possiamo cadere nell’abitudine di pensarlo un paese familiare. Non fa alcun male esporre i fatti in un modo che sembra sconnesso; giacché il primo fatto di tutti è che essi sono sconnessi. E il primo pericolo di tutti è che possiamo permettere a qualche assurdità internazionale o gergo giornalistico di lasciar intendere che siano connessi quando non lo sono. Non fa alcun male, almeno per cominciare, enunciare le differenze come inconciliabili. Poiché il primo e più insolito fatto che gli Inglesi devono imparare in questa strana terra è che le differenze possono essere inconciliabili. E ancora, il pericolo principale è che possano essere persuasi che i verbosi compromessi della politica occidentale possano conciliarle; che tali abissi possano essere colmati di ciarpame, o tali voragini scavalcate con ragnatele. Poiché in Inghilterra abbiamo creato una sorta di compromesso che fino a un certo punto può essere praticabile in Inghilterra; benché vi siano segni che perfino in Inghilterra quel punto si avvicini o sia passato. Ma in ogni caso potevamo permetterci quel compromesso come potevamo fare a meno della coscrizione; perché un accidente ci aveva resi insulari e persino provinciali. Così in India, dove abbiamo trattato i popoli come diversi da noi e l’uno dall’altro, abbiamo almeno in parte avuto successo. Così in Irlanda, dove abbiamo cercato di farli accordare con noi e tra loro, abbiamo creato un incubo senza fine.
Non possiamo sottomettere il mondo al compromesso inglese più di quanto possiamo sottometterlo al clima inglese; ed entrambi sono cose di incalcolabile nuvolaglia e crepuscolo. Ci siamo abituati a chiamare le cose con i nomi sbagliati e a sostenerle con gli argomenti sbagliati; e persino a fare la cosa giusta per la causa sbagliata. Abbiamo governi di partito composti di persone che fingono di essere d’accordo quando in realtà dissentono. Abbiamo dibattiti di partito composti di persone che fingono di dissentire quando in realtà sono d’accordo. Abbiamo interi partiti che prendono nome da cose che non sostengono più, o da cose che non si sognerebbero mai di proporre. Abbiamo una massa di cerimoniali parlamentari privi di senso che non sono più nemmeno simbolici; la regola per cui un parlamentare possiede un collegio ma non un cognome; o la regola per cui egli diventa ministro al fine di cessare di essere membro. Tutto ciò sembrerebbe la più superstiziosa e idolatra pantomima ai semplici devoti nei santuari di Gerusalemme. Potete ritenere fantastico ciò che dicono, o fanatico ciò che intendono, ma essi non dicono una cosa e ne intendono un’altra. Il Greco può avere o no il diritto di dire che è Ortodosso, ma intende che è Ortodosso; in un senso molto diverso da quello in cui un uomo che sostiene un nuovo Home Rule Bill intende di essere Unionista. Un Musulmano fermerebbe la vendita di bevande forti perché è Musulmano. Ma non è così confuso di mente da professare di fermarla perché è un Liberale, e un particolare sostenitore del partito della libertà. Anzi, persino in Inghilterra si troverà in genere che vi è qualcosa di più chiaro e razionale nei termini della teologia che in quelli della politica e della scienza popolare. Un uomo ha almeno una nozione più logica di ciò che intende quando si dice Anglo-Cattolico che quando si dice Anglo-Sassone. Ma il vecchio Ebreo dai riccioli cadenti, che striscia dentro e fuori dalle piccole botteghe nere di Gerusalemme, non si abbasserebbe a dire di essere figlio di qualcosa come la razza anglo-sassone. Non dice di essere figlio della razza aramaico-semitica. Dice di essere figlio della Razza Eletta, tratto con tuoni e con miracoli e con potenti battaglie fuori dalla terra d’Egitto e fuori dalla casa di schiavitù. In altre parole, dice qualcosa che significa qualcosa, e qualcosa che intende davvero. Uno dei bianchi Domenicani o dei bruni Francescani, dai grandi monasteri della Città Santa, può aver ragione o no nel sostenere che un Papato è necessario all’unità della Cristianità. Ma non passa la vita a dimostrare che il Papato non è un Papato, come molti dei nostri costituzionalisti liberali la passano a dimostrare che la Monarchia non è una Monarchia. I preti greci spendono un’ora in ciò che allo scettico paiono mere formalità prive di senso della preparazione della Messa. Ma non spenderebbero un minuto se fossero essi stessi scettici e le ritenessero formalità prive di senso, come la maggior parte della gente moderna pensa delle formalità riguardanti il Black Rod o la Sbarra della Camera. Sarebbero assai meno ritualisti di noi, se della Messa importasse loro tanto poco quanto a noi importa della Mazza. Quindi è necessario che ci rendiamo conto che questi rozzi e semplici devoti, di tutte le diverse forme di culto, sarebbero davvero sconcertati dalle danze rituali e dalle elaborate buffonate cerimoniali di John Bull, come dalle forme superstiziose e dagli incantesimi quasi soprannaturali di gran parte di ciò che noi chiamiamo semplice inglese.
Now I take it we retain enough realism and common sense not to wish to transfer these complicated conventions and compromises to a land of such ruthless logic and such rending divisions. We may hope to reproduce our laws, we do not want to reproduce our legal fictions. We do not want to insist on everybody referring to Mr. Peter or Mr. Paul, as the honourable member for Waddy Walleh; because a retiring Parliamentarian has to become Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, we shall not insist on a retiring Palestinian official becoming Steward of the Moabitic Hundreds. But yet in much more subtle and more dangerous ways we are making that very mistake. We are transferring the fictions and even the hypocrisies of our own insular institutions from a place where they can 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 attempting as yet to solve it; because I think the danger is rather that we shall underrate the difficulties than overdo the description; that we shall too easily deny the problem rather than that we shall too severely criticise the solution. But I would conclude this chapter with one practical criticism which seems to me to follow directly from 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 entirely according to the ritual or routine of our own Parliament. It is a parliament 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 is different from what it is called, and even from what its name is called. It is death and destruction to send out these fictions into a foreign daylight, where they will be seen as things and not theories. And knowing all this, I cannot conceive the reason, or even the meaning, of sending out Sir Herbert Samuel as the British representative 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 contradiction to Zionism. Zionism, as I have always understood it, and indeed as I have always defended it, consists in maintaining that it would be better for all parties if Israel had the dignity and distinctive responsibility of a separate nation; and that this 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 in Palestine he cannot go there as a representative of England. If it is in England, he is so far a living proof that a Jew does not need a national home in Palestine. If there is any point in the Zionist argument at all, you have chosen precisely the wrong man and sent him to precisely the wrong country. You have asserted not the independence but the dependence of Israel, and yet you have ratified the worst insinuations about the dependence of Christendom. In reason you could not more strongly state that Palestine does not belong 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 is claiming it for the Jews. You combine all possible disadvantages of all possible courses of action; you run all the risks of the hard Zionist adventure, while actually denying the high Zionist ideal. You make a Jew admit he is not a Jew but an Englishman; even while you allow all his enemies to revile him because he is not an Englishman but 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 very enjoyable in London. There is a beauty in that brown twilight as well as in the clear skies of the Orient and the South. But it is simply horribly dangerous for a Londoner to carry his cloud of fog about with him, in the crystalline air about the 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 may consider 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 of Parliament who is supposed to represent certain miners in Yorkshire, or in twenty other more or less impersonal ways. But the people in Palestine will see only one aspect, and it will be a very personal aspect 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 willing to remain in London, and who is ready to represent Westminster. Meanwhile, for the masses of Moslems and Christians, he will only be the aggravation in practice of the very thing of which he is the denial in theory. He will not mean that Palestine is 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 unexpected reactions we shall produce if we thrust our own unrealities amid the red-hot realities of the Near East; it is like pushing a snow man into a furnace. I have no objection to a snow man as a part of our own 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 muddling of mistaken identity in their real and unique success in India. They may have been wrong or right but they were realistic about Moslems and Hindoos; they did not say Moslems were Hindoos, or send a highly intelligent 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 desirability of distinguishing between entirely different things. But I remembered that of late their tact had often failed them even in their chief success in India; and that every hour brought worse and wilder news of their failure in Ireland. I remembered that in the Early Victorian time, against the advice only of the wisest and subtlest of the Early Victorians, we had tied ourselves to the triumphant progress of industrial capitalism; and that progress 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 foreign policy seemed to be doing these irrational and random things. A sort of fear took hold of me; and it was not for the Holy Land that I feared.
A cold wave went over me, like that unreasonable change and chill with 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 I wondered if we had come to the end of compromise and comfortable nonsense, and if at last the successful stupidity of England would topple over like the successful wickedness of Prussia; because God is not mocked by the denial of reason any more than the denial of justice. And I fancied the very crowds of Jerusalem retorted on me words spoken to them long ago; that a great voice crying of old along the 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.
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Ora, presumo che conserviamo abbastanza realismo e buon senso da non desiderare di trasferire queste complicate convenzioni e compromessi in una terra di logica così spietata e di divisioni così laceranti. Possiamo sperare di riprodurre le nostre leggi, non vogliamo riprodurre le nostre finzioni giuridiche. Non vogliamo insistere che tutti si riferiscano al signor Pietro o al signor Paolo come all’onorevole rappresentante di Waddy Walleh; poiché un parlamentare che si ritira deve diventare Steward dei Chiltern Hundreds, non insisteremo perché un funzionario palestinese che si ritira diventi Steward dei Moabitic Hundreds. Eppure, in modi assai più sottili e più pericolosi, stiamo commettendo proprio quell’errore. Stiamo trasferendo le finzioni e persino le ipocrisie delle nostre insulari istituzioni da un luogo dove possono essere tollerate a un luogo dove saranno fatte a pezzi. Mi sono finora limitato a descrizioni e non a critiche, a enunciare gli elementi del problema piuttosto che a tentare per ora di risolverlo; perché ritengo che il pericolo sia piuttosto di sottovalutare le difficoltà che di esagerare la descrizione; che troppo facilmente neghiamo il problema piuttosto che criticare troppo severamente la soluzione. Ma vorrei concludere questo capitolo con una critica pratica che mi sembra seguire direttamente da tutto ciò che qui si è detto delle nostre finzioni giuridiche e anomalie locali. Una cosa almeno è stata fatta dal nostro stesso Governo, del tutto conforme al rituale o alla routine del nostro stesso Parlamento. È un parlamento di Pooh-Bah, dove chiunque può essere Gran Lord di Tutto il Resto. È un parlamento di Alice nel Paese delle Meraviglie, dove il nome di una cosa è diverso da come essa è chiamata, e persino da come è chiamato il suo nome. È morte e distruzione mandare queste finzioni in una luce diurna straniera, dove saranno viste come cose e non teorie. E sapendo tutto ciò, non riesco a concepire la ragione, e nemmeno il senso, dell’inviare Sir Herbert Samuel come rappresentante britannico in Palestina.
L’ho sentito sostenere come un interessante esperimento di Sionismo. L’ho sentito denunciare come una vile concessione al Sionismo. Io penso che sia con tutta evidenza una piatta e violenta contraddizione del Sionismo. Il Sionismo, così come l’ho sempre inteso, e in verità così come l’ho sempre difeso, consiste nel sostenere che sarebbe meglio per tutte le parti se Israele avesse la dignità e la distinta responsabilità di una nazione separata; e che ciò si dovrebbe attuare, se possibile, o per quanto possibile, dando agli Ebrei un focolare nazionale, preferibilmente in Palestina. Ma dov’è il focolare nazionale di Sir Herbert Samuel? Se è in Palestina, egli non può recarvisi come rappresentante dell’Inghilterra. Se è in Inghilterra, egli è a tal punto una prova vivente che un Ebreo non ha bisogno di un focolare nazionale in Palestina. Se c’è un qualche senso nell’argomento sionista, avete scelto precisamente l’uomo sbagliato e l’avete mandato precisamente nel paese sbagliato. Avete affermato non l’indipendenza ma la dipendenza di Israele, e tuttavia avete ratificato le peggiori insinuazioni sulla dipendenza della Cristianità. Ragionevolmente non potreste affermare più fortemente che la Palestina non appartiene agli Ebrei, che mandando un Ebreo a rivendicarla per gli Inglesi. Eppure in pratica, naturalmente, tutti gli Antisemiti diranno che egli la rivendica per gli Ebrei. Combinate tutti i possibili svantaggi di tutte le possibili linee di condotta; correte tutti i rischi della dura avventura sionista, mentre di fatto negate l’alto ideale sionista. Fate ammettere a un Ebreo che egli non è un Ebreo ma un Inglese; mentre insieme permettete a tutti i suoi nemici di ingiuriarlo perché non è un Inglese ma un Ebreo.
Ora, questa specie di confusione o compromesso è tanto locale quanto una nebbia di Londra. Una nebbia di Londra è tollerabile a Londra, anzi la trovo assai gradevole a Londra. C’è una bellezza in quel crepuscolo bruno come pure nei cieli limpidi dell’Oriente e del Sud. Ma è semplicemente e orribilmente pericoloso per un Londinese portarsi appresso la propria nube di nebbia, nell’aria cristallina attorno alle rupi di Sion, o sotto le terribili stelle del deserto. Là gli uomini vedono le differenze con chiarezza quasi innaturale, e chiamano le cose con nomi ferocemente semplici. Noi in Inghilterra possiamo considerare ogni sorta di aspetti di un uomo come Sir Herbert Samuel; possiamo considerarlo come un Liberale, o un amico dei Socialisti Fabiani, o un cadetto di una delle grandi case finanziarie, o un Membro del Parlamento che si suppone rappresenti certi minatori nello Yorkshire, o in venti altri modi più o meno impersonali. Ma il popolo in Palestina vedrà un solo aspetto, e sarà davvero un aspetto molto personale. Per i Musulmani entusiasti egli sarà semplicemente un Ebreo; per i Sionisti entusiasti egli non sarà davvero un Sionista. Per loro egli sarà sempre il tipo di Ebreo disposto a rimanere a Londra, e pronto a rappresentare Westminster. Nel frattempo, per le masse dei Musulmani e dei Cristiani, egli sarà soltanto l’aggravamento in pratica di quella stessa cosa di cui è la negazione in teoria. Egli non significherà che la Palestina non è ceduta agli Ebrei, ma soltanto che lo è l’Inghilterra. Ora, per il momento non ho nulla a che fare con la verità di quella supposizione; la porto solo come esempio delle reazioni violente e inaspettate che produrremo se cacceremo le nostre irrealtà in mezzo alle realtà roventi del Vicino Oriente; è come spingere un pupazzo di neve in una fornace. Non ho obiezioni a un pupazzo di neve come parte delle nostre feste natalizie; anzi, come già si è suggerito, ritengo tali feste una grande gloria della vita inglese. Ma ho visto la neve sciogliersi nei luoghi scoscesi attorno a Gerusalemme; e so quale cateratta essa potrebbe alimentare.
Mentre consideravo queste cose un’inquietudine crescente si impadronì di me, e i miei pensieri erano lontani dal luogo in cui mi trovavo. Dopo tutto, gli Inglesi non si concessero questo raddoppiamento di ruoli e questa confusione di identità scambiate nel loro reale e unico successo in India. Possono aver avuto torto o ragione, ma furono realistici riguardo ai Musulmani e agli Indù; non dissero che i Musulmani erano Indù, né mandarono un Indù di grande intelligenza da Oxford a governare i Musulmani come un Inglese. Può non essere importato loro di cose come l’ideale del Sionismo; ma compresero il buon senso del Sionismo, l’opportunità di distinguere tra cose interamente diverse. Ma ricordai che di recente il loro tatto li aveva spesso traditi persino nel loro principale successo in India; e che ogni ora recava notizie peggiori e più sfrenate del loro fallimento in Irlanda. Ricordai che nel tempo della prima età vittoriana, contro il consiglio soltanto dei più saggi e sottili tra i primi Vittoriani, ci eravamo legati al progresso trionfante del capitalismo industriale; e che quel progresso era ora giunto a una crisi e a quello che poteva ben essere un tracollo. E ora, per giunta a tutto, la nostra bella tradizione patriottica di politica estera sembrava compiere queste cose irrazionali e casuali. Una sorta di paura mi afferrò; e non era per la Terra Santa che temevo.
Un’onda fredda mi passò addosso, come quel mutamento irragionevole e quel gelo con cui un uomo lontano da casa immagina che la sua casa sia stata bruciata, o che coloro che gli sono cari siano morti. Per un orribile istante almeno mi chiesi se fossimo giunti alla fine del compromesso e delle comode assurdità, e se infine la fortunata stupidità dell’Inghilterra sarebbe crollata come la fortunata malvagità della Prussia; perché Dio non si lascia beffare dalla negazione della ragione più che dalla negazione della giustizia. E immaginai che le folle stesse di Gerusalemme mi ritorcessero contro parole loro rivolte molto tempo addietro; che una grande voce che gridava anticamente lungo la Via Dolorosa mi fosse rimandata come tuono dalle montagne; e che tutti quei volti stranieri siano oggi rivolti contro di noi, ingiungendoci di non piangere per loro, che hanno fede e chiarezza e uno scopo, ma di piangere per noi stessi e per i nostri figli.
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CHAPTER VIII
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DESERT
There was a story in Jerusalem so true or so well told that I can see the actors in it like figures in coloured costumes on a lighted stage. It occurred during the last days of Turkish occupation, while the English advance was still halted before Gaza, and heroically enduring the slow death of desert warfare. There were German and Austrian elements present in the garrison with the Turks, though the three allies seem to have held strangely aloof from each other. In the Austrian group there was an Austrian lady, “who had some dignity or 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 indiscriminate charity for the poor and indiscriminate loathing for the Prussians. She was a nurse; she was also a nuisance. One day she was driving just outside the Jaffa Gate, when she saw one of those figures which 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 if he were going to be crowned king in the city; with his head lifted as if he saw apocalyptic stars in heaven, and a gesture at which the towers might fall. This man was ragged beyond all that moving rag-heap; he was as gaunt as a gallows tree, and the thing he 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 see in a vision, with his face of wood and his air of still trailing all the heraldic trappings of the Holy Roman Empire. This ambassador soon returned in state and said, “Your Serene High Sublimity (or whatever it is), he says he is cursing the English.” Her pity and patriotism were alike moved; and she again sent the plenipotentiary to discover why he cursed the English, or what tale of wrong or ruin at 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 general truth to which it testifies; that the Turkish rule was not popular even with Moslems, and that the German war was not particularly popular even with Turks. When all deductions are made for the patriot as a partisan, and his way of picking up only what pleases him, it remains true that the English attack was very widely regarded rather as a rescue than an aggression. And what complaint there was really was, in many cases, a complaint that the rescue did not come with a rush; that the English forces had to fall back when they had actually entered Gaza, and could not for long afterwards continue their advance on Jerusalem. This kind of 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 excusable than that of the poor Arab in Jerusalem; who cursed the English with the addition of being English themselves, who did it, not as he did, before one foreigner, but before all foreign opinion; and who advertised 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 can only be known to the staff on the spot; it is not a question of lack of water but of exactly how little water; not of the arrival 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 other end of the world; and these are the things which, for the soldier on the spot, make all the difference between jumping over a paling and jumping over a precipice. Even the latter, as the philosophic relativist will eagerly point out, is only a matter of degree. But this is a parenthesis; for the purpose with which I mentioned the anecdote is something different. It is the text of another and somewhat more elusive truth; some appreciation of which is necessary to a sympathy with the more profound problems of Palestine. And it might be expressed thus; it is a proverb that the Eastern methods seem to us slow; that the Arabs trail along on labouring camels while the Europeans flash by on motors or mono-planes. But there 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 crawling like a snail.
I have said that there is another side to the desert; though there is something queer in talking of another side to something so bare and big and oppressively obvious. But there is another side besides the big and bare truths, like giant bones, that the Moslem has found 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 and the days I spent there, being carted from camp to camp and giving what were courteously described as lectures. All I can say is that if those were lectures, I cannot imagine why everybody is not a lecturer. Perhaps the secret is already out; and multitudes of men in evening dress are already dotted about the desert, wandering in search of an audience. Anyhow in my own wanderings I found myself in the high narrow house of the Base Commandant at Kantara, the only house in the whole circle 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 Pavilion looked as if St. Paul’s Cathedral had come down there and littered; and that grey vista of countless cones looked rather as if the Great Pyramid had multiplied itself on the prolific scale of the herring. Nor was even such a foolish fancy without its serious side; for though these pyramids would pass, the plan of them was also among the mightiest of 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 more historic because it may never be seen again. As the dusk fell and 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 almost colourless common sense of the soldier. All that they said was objective; one felt that everything they mentioned was really a thing and not merely a thought; a thing like a post or a palm-tree. I think there is something in this of a sympathy between the English and 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 another of the proverbial prophecies about the term of Turkish power. They said there was an old saying that the Turk would never depart until the Nile flowed through Palestine; and this at least was 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.
CAPITOLO VIII
L’ALTRO LATO DEL DESERTO
Correva a Gerusalemme una storia così vera o così ben raccontata che riesco a vederne gli attori come figure in costumi colorati su un palcoscenico illuminato. Accadde durante gli ultimi giorni dell’occupazione turca, mentre l’avanzata inglese era ancora ferma davanti a Gaza, e sopportava eroicamente la lenta morte della guerra nel deserto. Vi erano elementi tedeschi e austriaci presenti nella guarnigione insieme ai Turchi, benché i tre alleati sembrino essersi stranamente tenuti in disparte l’uno dall’altro. Nel gruppo austriaco c’era una dama austriaca, «che aveva una qualche dignità o altro», come la nonna di Lord Lundy. Era bellissima, molto alla moda, alquanto frivola, ma con accessi di devozione cattolica. Possedeva alcune preziosissime virtù cristiane, come una carità indiscriminata per i poveri e un ribrezzo indiscriminato per i Prussiani. Era un’infermiera; era anche una seccatura. Un giorno stava passando in carrozza appena fuori dalla Porta di Giaffa, quando vide una di quelle figure che fanno sembrare la Città Santa l’eterna crisi di un’epopea. Un uomo simile varcherà la porta nei più spettrali stracci come se stesse per essere incoronato re nella città; col capo levato come se vedesse stelle apocalittiche in cielo, e con un gesto al quale le torri potrebbero crollare. Quest’uomo era cencioso oltre tutto quel movente mucchio di stracci; era scarno come una forca, e ciò che andava proferendo con le braccia levate al cielo era evidentemente una maledizione. La dama mandò a chiedere per mezzo del suo servo tedesco, che anch’egli riesco a vedere in una visione, col suo volto di legno e la sua aria di trascinare ancora tutti i fregi araldici del Sacro Romano Impero. Questo ambasciatore tornò presto in pompa e disse: «Vostra Serena Alta Sublimità (o comunque sia), egli dice che sta maledicendo gli Inglesi.» La sua pietà e il suo patriottismo furono egualmente commossi; ed ella mandò di nuovo il plenipotenziario a scoprire perché maledicesse gli Inglesi, o quale racconto di torto o di rovina per mano inglese si celasse dietro gli ampi gesti della sua disperazione. Una seconda volta il legnoso intermediario tornò e disse: «Vostra Estatica Eccellenza (o quale che sia la forma corretta), egli dice che sta maledicendo gli Inglesi perché non vengono.»
Vi sono moltissime morali in questa storia, oltre alla verità generale di cui essa fa testimonianza; che il dominio turco non era popolare nemmeno tra i Musulmani, e che la guerra tedesca non era particolarmente popolare nemmeno tra i Turchi. Fatte tutte le detrazioni per il patriota in quanto partigiano, e per il suo modo di raccogliere solo ciò che gli piace, resta vero che l’attacco inglese fu assai largamente considerato piuttosto come un soccorso che come un’aggressione. E quel poco di lamentela che vi fu era davvero, in molti casi, la lamentela che il soccorso non giungesse con impeto; che le forze inglesi avessero dovuto ripiegare quando erano effettivamente entrate a Gaza, e non potessero per lungo tempo dopo proseguire la loro avanzata su Gerusalemme. Questo genere di critica delle operazioni militari è sempre, naturalmente, privo di valore. Nei giornalisti è in genere privo di valore senza essere neppure innocuo. Ve ne furono alcuni a Londra i cui pessimistici lamenti erano meno scusabili di quelli del povero Arabo a Gerusalemme; i quali maledicevano gli Inglesi con l’aggravante di essere Inglesi essi stessi, e lo facevano, non come lui, davanti a un solo straniero, ma davanti a tutta l’opinione straniera; e i quali facevano pubblicità al proprio fallimento in una sorta di stracci meno rispettabili dei suoi. Nessuno può giudicare di un punto come la presa e la perdita di Gaza, a meno che non conosca un’enorme massa di dettagli tecnici e locali che possono essere noti soltanto allo stato maggiore sul posto; non è questione di mancanza d’acqua ma di quanto poca acqua esattamente; non dell’arrivo di rinforzi ma di quanto rinforzo esattamente; non se il tempo stringa, ma di quanto tempo vi sia esattamente. Nessuno che diriga un giornale all’altro capo del mondo può conoscere queste cose; e queste sono le cose che, per il soldato sul posto, fanno tutta la differenza tra saltare uno steccato e saltare un precipizio. Persino quest’ultimo, come il relativista filosofico si affretterà a rilevare, è solo una questione di grado. Ma questa è una parentesi; giacché lo scopo per cui ho menzionato l’aneddoto è qualcosa di diverso. Esso è il testo di un’altra e alquanto più sfuggente verità; una certa comprensione della quale è necessaria a una simpatia con i problemi più profondi della Palestina. E potrebbe essere espressa così; è un luogo comune che i metodi orientali ci sembrino lenti; che gli Arabi arranchino su cammelli affaticati mentre gli Europei sfrecciano su automobili o monoplani. Ma vi è un altro e più strano senso in cui noi sembriamo davvero lenti a loro, ed essi sembrano davvero a se stessi possedere un segreto di rapidità. Vi è un senso in cui qui tocchiamo i confini di una terra di folgore; attraverso la quale, come in un sogno, si può vedere l’automobile strisciare come una lumaca.
Ho detto che vi è un altro lato del deserto; benché ci sia qualcosa di curioso nel parlare di un altro lato di qualcosa di così nudo e grande e opprimentemente ovvio. Ma vi è un altro lato oltre alle grandi e nude verità, simili a ossa di gigante, che il Musulmano ha trovato là; vi è, per così dire, un rovescio dell’ovvio. E per suggerire ciò che intendo devo tornare ancora al deserto e ai giorni che vi trascorsi, trasportato di campo in campo a tenere ciò che venivano cortesemente descritte come conferenze. Tutto ciò che posso dire è che, se quelle erano conferenze, non riesco a immaginare perché non tutti siano conferenzieri. Forse il segreto è già trapelato; e moltitudini di uomini in abito da sera sono già disseminate per il deserto, vagando in cerca di un pubblico. Comunque, nelle mie peregrinazioni mi trovai nell’alta e stretta casa del Comandante di Base a Kantara, l’unica casa in tutto il cerchio dell’orizzonte; e dalla balaustra di legno e dalla veranda, che ne correvano tutt’intorno alla sommità, si potevano scorgere nove miglia di tende. Sydney Smith disse che le cupole bulbose del Padiglione di Brighton sembravano come se la Cattedrale di San Paolo fosse scesa laggiù e avesse figliato; e quella grigia distesa di innumerevoli coni sembrava piuttosto come se la Grande Piramide si fosse moltiplicata sulla prolifica scala dell’aringa. Né persino una fantasia tanto sciocca era priva del suo lato serio; poiché, sebbene queste piramidi sarebbero passate, il loro disegno era pure tra le più possenti opere dell’uomo; e il re in ogni piramide era vivo. Poiché questo era il grande campo che era il perno della più grande campagna; e da quel balcone avevo contemplato qualcosa di tanto più storico in quanto forse non sarà mai più veduto. Mentre calava il crepuscolo e la luna si faceva più chiara sopra quella grande spettrale città di tela, mi ero messo a conversare con tre o quattro degli ufficiali alla base; uomini brizzolati e dalla testa dura che parlavano con tutto il curioso e quasi incolore buon senso del soldato. Tutto ciò che dicevano era oggettivo; si sentiva che tutto ciò che menzionavano era davvero una cosa e non un mero pensiero; una cosa come un palo o una palma. Penso che in ciò vi sia qualcosa di una simpatia tra gli Inglesi e i Musulmani, che può averci aiutati in India e altrove. Poiché essi menzionarono molti proverbi e tradizioni musulmane, con abbastanza leggerezza ma non con disprezzo, e in particolare un’altra delle proverbiali profezie sulla durata del potere turco. Dissero che c’era un vecchio detto secondo cui il Turco non se ne sarebbe mai andato finché il Nilo non fosse scorso attraverso la Palestina; e questo almeno era evidentemente un proverbio d’orgoglio e di sicurezza, come molti simili; come chi dicesse finché il mare non sia asciutto o il sole non sorga a occidente. E uno di loro sorrise e fece un piccolo gesto come d’attenzione. E nel silenzio di quella scena illuminata dalla luna udimmo il fragore metallico di una pompa. L’acqua del Nilo era stata condotta in tubi attraverso il deserto.
And I thought that the symbol was a sound one, apart from all vanities; for this is indeed the special sort of thing that Christendom can do, and that Islam by itself would hardly care to do. I heard more afterwards of that water, which was eventually carried up 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 sense among the natives themselves of something magic in our machinery, and that in the main a white magic; the sense of all the more solid sort of 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 that an old Arab standing by said, in the plain and powerful phraseology of 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 Western work because the same conversation swerved slowly, as it were, to the Eastern side. These same men, who talked of all things as if they were chairs and tables, began to talk quite calmly of things more amazing than table-turning. They were as wonderful as if the 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 wire across the wastes, hearing of something that had that moment happened hundreds of miles away, and then coming upon a casual Bedouin who knew it already. They spoke of the whole tribes moving and on the march, upon news that could only come a little later by the swiftest wires of 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 to realities for that. That word, which will instantly leap to the lips of too many of my readers, strikes me as merely an evidence of two of our great modern improvements; the love of long words and the loss of common sense. It may have been telepathy, whatever that is; but a man must be almost stunned with stupidity if he is satisfied to say telepathy as if he were saying telegraphy. If everybody is satisfied about how it is done, why does not everybody do it? Why does not a cultivated clergyman in Cornwall make a casual remark to an old friend of his at the University of Aberdeen? Why does not a harassed commercial traveller in Barcelona settle a question by merely thinking about his business partner in Berlin? The common sense 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 all mysteries the modern world thinks most superstitious and senseless; the mystery of locality. It works back at last to the hardest of all the hard sayings of supernaturalism; that there is such a thing as 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 much the presiding genius. It is true that everywhere to-day a parade of the theory 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 the mysterious forces which men are once more studying. The words we now address to the unseen powers may be vague and universal, but the words they are said to address to us are parochial and even private. While the Higher Thought Centre would widen worship everywhere to a temple not made with hands, the Psychical Research Society is 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 who comes to expose the ghost-haunted churchyard has to haunt the churchyard like a ghost. There may be something faintly amusing about the idea of demi-gods with door-knockers and dinner tables, and demons, one may almost say, keeping the home fires burning. But the driving force of this dark mystery of locality is all the more indisputable because 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 concentrate in space as in time, or find in a spot something that corresponds to a crisis. And if this be felt everywhere, it is necessarily and abnormally felt in those alleged holy places and sacred spots. It is felt supremely in all those lands of the Near East which lie about the holy hill of Zion.
In these lands an impression grows steadily on the mind much too large for most of the recent religious or scientific definitions. The bogus heraldry of Haeckel is as obviously insufficient as any quaint old chronicle tracing the genealogies of English kings through the 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 mere score in the Victorian game of Scripture versus Science. Some much larger mystery veils the origins of man than most partisans on either side have realised; and in these strange primeval plains the traveller does realise it. It was never so well expressed as by one of the most promising of those whose literary possibilities were gloriously broken off by the great war; Lieutenant Warre-Cornish who left a strange and striking fragment, about a man who came to these lands with a mystical idea of forcing himself back against the stream of time into the very fountain of creation. This is a parenthesis; but before resuming the more immediate matter of the supernormal tricks of the tribes of the East, it is well to recognise this very real if much more general historic impression about the particular lands in which they lived. I have called it a historic impression; but it might more truly be called a prehistoric impression. It is best expressed in symbol by saying that 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 form of wheat had just, for the first time, been discovered in Palestine.
E pensai che il simbolo fosse valido, a prescindere da ogni vanità; poiché questa è davvero la specie particolare di cosa che la Cristianità sa fare, e che l’Islam da solo difficilmente si curerebbe di fare. In seguito udii di più di quell’acqua, che alla fine fu portata su per i colli fino a Gerusalemme, quando io stesso la seguii fin lassù; e tutto ciò che udii recava testimonianza di questa verità per quanto essa arrivi; il senso, tra gli indigeni stessi, di qualcosa di magico nelle nostre macchine, e per lo più di una magia bianca; il senso di tutta quella specie più solida di servizio sociale che appartiene piuttosto all’Occidente che all’Oriente. Quando la fontana zampillò per la prima volta nella Città Santa tra le montagne, e Padre Waggett la benedisse per l’uso degli uomini, si dice che un vecchio Arabo lì presente disse, nella schietta e potente fraseologia del suo popolo: «I Turchi sono stati qui cinquecento anni, e non ci hanno mai dato una tazza d’acqua fredda.»
Pongo per primo questo minimo di verità sulla validità dell’opera occidentale perché la stessa conversazione deviò lentamente, per così dire, verso il lato orientale. Questi stessi uomini, che parlavano di ogni cosa come se fossero sedie e tavoli, cominciarono a parlare con tutta calma di cose più stupefacenti del far girare i tavoli. Erano meravigliose come se l’acqua fosse giunta là come il vento, senza alcun tubo o pompa; o se Padre Waggett avesse semplicemente percosso la roccia come Mosè. Parlarono di un soldato solitario all’estremità di un unico filo telefonico attraverso le lande desolate, che apprendeva di qualcosa accaduto in quello stesso istante a centinaia di miglia di distanza, e poi si imbatteva in un Beduino qualsiasi che già lo sapeva. Parlarono di intere tribù che si muovevano e si mettevano in marcia, per notizie che potevano giungere solo un poco più tardi coi più veloci fili dell’uomo bianco. Non offrirono alcuna spiegazione di queste cose; sapevano semplicemente che c’erano, come le palme e la luna. Non dissero che fosse «telepatia»; vivevano troppo vicino alle realtà per questo. Quella parola, che balzerà all’istante alle labbra di troppi tra i miei lettori, mi appare soltanto come una prova di due dei nostri grandi progressi moderni; l’amore per le parole lunghe e la perdita del buon senso. Può essere stata telepatia, qualunque cosa essa sia; ma un uomo dev’essere quasi tramortito dalla stupidità se si accontenta di dire telepatia come se dicesse telegrafia. Se tutti sono soddisfatti su come lo si fa, perché non lo fanno tutti? Perché un colto ecclesiastico in Cornovaglia non rivolge un’osservazione casuale a un suo vecchio amico all’Università di Aberdeen? Perché un tormentato commesso viaggiatore a Barcellona non risolve una questione limitandosi a pensare al suo socio d’affari a Berlino? Il buon senso della cosa è, naturalmente, che il nome non fa alcuna differenza; il mistero è perché alcuni possano farlo e altri no; e perché sembri facile in un luogo e impossibile in un altro. In altre parole, si torna a quello stesso mistero che, fra tutti i misteri, il mondo moderno reputa il più superstizioso e insensato; il mistero della località. Risale infine alla più dura di tutte le dure sentenze del soprannaturalismo; che esista una cosa come un suolo sacro o profano, come genti divinamente o diabolicamente ispirate; che possano esistere cose come luoghi sacri o persino pietre sacre; in breve, che l’aereo nulla dell’essenza spirituale, malvagia o buona, possa avere proprio letteralmente una dimora locale e un nome.
Si può dire di sfuggita che questo genius loci è qui in gran parte il genio che presiede. È vero che ovunque oggi una parata della teoria del panteismo si accompagna a una considerevole pratica del particolarismo; e che dovunque la gente comincia a desiderare di essere in qualche luogo. E persino là dove non è vero degli uomini, sembra esser vero delle misteriose forze che gli uomini stanno di nuovo studiando. Le parole che ora rivolgiamo alle potenze invisibili possono essere vaghe e universali, ma le parole che si dice esse rivolgano a noi sono parrocchiali e persino private. Mentre il Higher Thought Centre allargherebbe il culto ovunque a un tempio non fatto da mani d’uomo, la Society for Psychical Research conduce esperimenti pratici attorno a una casa infestata. Gli uomini possono farsi cosmopoliti, ma i fantasmi restano patrioti. Gli uomini possono aspettarsi o no che un atto di guarigione abbia luogo presso un pozzo sacro, ma nessuno se lo aspetta a dieci miglia dal pozzo; e persino lo scettico che viene a smascherare il cimitero infestato dal fantasma deve aggirarsi per il cimitero come un fantasma. Vi può essere qualcosa di vagamente comico nell’idea di semidèi con battenti alle porte e tavole imbandite, e di demoni, si potrebbe quasi dire, che tengono acceso il fuoco del focolare. Ma la forza propulsiva di questo oscuro mistero della località è tanto più indiscutibile in quanto spinge contro la maggior parte delle teorie e associazioni moderne. La verità è che, a una considerazione più trascendentale, non sappiamo che cosa sia il luogo più di quanto sappiamo che cosa sia il tempo. Non sappiamo delle potenze ignote che esse non possano concentrarsi nello spazio come nel tempo, o trovare in un punto qualcosa che corrisponda a una crisi. E se ciò si avverte ovunque, lo si avverte necessariamente e anormalmente in quei presunti luoghi santi e punti sacri. Lo si avverte supremamente in tutte quelle terre del Vicino Oriente che si stendono attorno al sacro colle di Sion.
In queste terre un’impressione cresce costantemente sulla mente, troppo vasta per la maggior parte delle recenti definizioni religiose o scientifiche. La fasulla araldica di Haeckel è manifestamente insufficiente quanto una qualsiasi bizzarra vecchia cronaca che faccia risalire le genealogie dei re inglesi attraverso i capi di Troia fino ai figli di Noè. Non c’è differenza, salvo che il racconto dei Secoli Bui non può mai essere provato, mentre la parodia della teoria darwiniana può talvolta essere confutata. Ma diminuirei il mio significato se lo proponessi come un mero punto nel gioco vittoriano di Scrittura contro Scienza. Un mistero assai più grande vela le origini dell’uomo di quanto la maggior parte dei partigiani dell’una o dell’altra parte abbia compreso; e in queste strane pianure primordiali il viaggiatore lo comprende davvero. Non fu mai espresso così bene come da uno dei più promettenti tra coloro le cui possibilità letterarie furono gloriosamente troncate dalla grande guerra; il tenente Warre-Cornish, che lasciò uno strano e sorprendente frammento, su un uomo che venne in queste terre con l’idea mistica di risospingersi indietro contro la corrente del tempo fin dentro la sorgente stessa della creazione. Questa è una parentesi; ma prima di riprendere la questione più immediata dei trucchi supernormali delle tribù d’Oriente, è bene riconoscere questa impressione storica assai reale, per quanto assai più generale, riguardo alle particolari terre in cui esse vivevano. L’ho chiamata un’impressione storica; ma più veramente potrebbe chiamarsi un’impressione preistorica. Si esprime meglio in simbolo dicendo che il sito leggendario del Giardino dell’Eden è in Mesopotamia. Si esprime egualmente bene nell’esperienza concreta dicendo che, quando ero da quelle parti, un uomo dotto mi disse che la forma primitiva del frumento era appena stata scoperta, per la prima volta, in Palestina.
The feeling that fills the traveller may be faintly suggested thus; that here, in this legendary land between Asia and Europe, may well have happened whatever did happen; that through this Eastern gate, if any, entered whatever made and changed the world. Whatever else this narrow strip of land may seem like, it does really seem, to the spirit and almost to the senses, like the bridge that may have borne across archaic abysses the burden and the mystery of man. Here have been civilisations as old as any barbarism; to all appearance 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 fancy that all wild animals had once been tame. As I said elsewhere, all might be a runaway menagerie; the whale a cow that went swimming and 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 and Primitive Man and all the other random guesses from dubious bits of bone and stone. And the truth is some third thing, too tremendous to 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 another sense it is literally the other side. It is the other shore of that shifting and arid sea. Looking at it from the West and considering mainly the case of the Moslem, we feel the desert is but a barren border-land of Christendom; but seen from the other side it is the barrier between us and a heathendom far more mysterious and even monstrous than anything Moslem can be. Indeed it is necessary to realise this more vividly in order to feel the virtue of the Moslem movement. It belonged to the desert, but in one sense it was rather a clearance in the cloud that rests upon the desert; a rift of pale but clean light in volumes of vapour rolled on it like smoke from the strange lands beyond. It conceived a fixed hatred of idolatry, partly because its face was turned towards the multitudinous idolatries of the lands of sunrise; and as I looked Eastward I seemed to be conscious of the beginnings of that other world; and saw, like a forest of arms or a dream full of 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 us are not the romanticists but the realists. Every one can feel it in the work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and when I once remarked on his repulsive little masterpiece called “The Mark of the Beast,” to a rather cynical Anglo-Indian officer, he observed moodily, “It’s a beastly story. But those devils really can do jolly queer things.” It is but to take a commonplace example out of countless more notable ones to mention the many witnesses to the mango trick. Here again we have from time to time to weep over the weak-mindedness that hurriedly dismisses it as the practice of hypnotism. It is as if people were asked to explain how one unarmed Indian had killed three hundred men, and they said it was only the practice of human sacrifice. Nothing that we know as hypnotism will enable a man to alter the eyes in the heads of a huge crowd of total strangers; wide awake in broad daylight; and if it is hypnotism, it is something so appallingly magnified as to need a new magic to explain the explanation; certainly something that explains it better than a Greek word for sleep. But the impression of these special instances is but one example of a more universal impression of the Asiatic atmosphere; and that atmosphere itself is only an example of something vaster still for which I am trying to find words. Asia stands for something which the world in the West as well as the East is more and more feeling as a presence, and even a 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 breaking down 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 their own scientific world.
The agnostics have been driven back on agnosticism; and are already recovering from the shock. They find themselves 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 back of their minds a clear and consistent concept of their rather clockwork cosmos; that is why they could not admit the smallest speck of the supernatural into their clockwork. But to-day it is very hard for a scientific man to say where the supernatural ends or 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 question of defining or denying a simple central power, but of balancing the brain in a bewilderment of new powers which seem to overlap and might even conflict. Nature herself has become unnatural. The wind is blowing from the other side of the desert, not now with noble truism “There is no God but God,” but rather with that other motto 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 growing mysteriously in the middle of a room. Taking this image for the sake of argument, we can easily fancy a man half-conscious and convinced that he is delirious, or still partly in a dream, because he sees such 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 is nothing unnatural but this one hovering hallucination or optical delusion of green and red. Now that was very much the view taken of the Rose of Sharon, the mystical rose of the sacred tradition of Palestine, by any educated man about 1850, when the rationalism of the eighteenth century was supposed to have found full support in the science of the nineteenth. He had a sentiment about 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 inconsistent with everything else. It was one solitary and monstrous exception 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 miracles only in Palestine and only for one short period? It was a single and 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 or the 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 calculus of their three dimensions. Darwin was already arranging the animals in rank as neatly as a row of chairs, or Faraday the 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 discoveries were in one direction. Science is still making discoveries; but they are in the opposite direction.
Il sentimento che riempie il viaggiatore può essere debolmente suggerito così; che qui, in questa terra leggendaria tra l’Asia e l’Europa, può ben essere accaduto qualunque cosa sia accaduta; che attraverso questa porta orientale, se attraverso alcuna, entrò ciò che fece e mutò il mondo. Quale che sia l’aspetto che questa stretta striscia di terra possa avere, essa sembra davvero, allo spirito e quasi ai sensi, come il ponte che può aver portato attraverso abissi arcaici il peso e il mistero dell’uomo. Qui vi sono state civiltà antiche quanto ogni barbarie; a ogni apparenza forse più antiche di ogni barbarie. Ecco il cammello; l’enorme innaturale amico dell’uomo; l’animale domestico preistorico. Non si sa che sia mai stato selvatico, e potrebbe indurre un uomo a immaginare che tutti gli animali selvatici fossero un tempo mansueti. Come ho detto altrove, tutto potrebbe essere un serraglio in fuga; la balena una vacca che se ne andò a nuotare e non tornò mai, la tigre un grosso gatto che si prese il premio (e chi lo assegnava) e fuggì nella giungla. Ciò non è (oso pensare) vero; ma è vero quanto il Pitecantropo e l’Uomo Primitivo e tutte le altre congetture casuali tratte da dubbi frammenti d’osso e di pietra. E la verità è qualche terza cosa, troppo tremenda per essere ricordata dagli uomini. Qualunque cosa fosse, forse il cammello la vide; ma dall’espressione sul volto di quel vecchio servitore di famiglia, sono certo che non lo dirà mai.
Ho chiamato questo l’altro lato del deserto; e in un altro senso è letteralmente l’altro lato. È l’altra sponda di quel mare mutevole e arido. Guardandolo dall’Occidente e considerando principalmente il caso del Musulmano, sentiamo che il deserto non è che una sterile terra di confine della Cristianità; ma visto dall’altro lato è la barriera tra noi e un paganesimo assai più misterioso e persino mostruoso di quanto nulla di musulmano possa essere. Anzi, è necessario rendersene conto più vividamente per sentire la virtù del movimento musulmano. Esso apparteneva al deserto, ma in un senso era piuttosto uno squarcio nella nube che grava sul deserto; una fenditura di luce pallida ma pura in masse di vapore rotolate su di esso come fumo dalle strane terre al di là. Concepì un odio fisso verso l’idolatria, in parte perché il suo volto era rivolto verso le moltitudinose idolatrie delle terre del levante; e mentre guardavo verso Oriente mi pareva di avere coscienza dei principii di quell’altro mondo; e vidi, come una foresta di braccia o un sogno pieno di volti, gli dèi dell’Asia sui loro mille troni.
Non è un mero romanticismo che la chiama una terra di magia, o persino di magia nera. Coloro che ci recano quell’atmosfera non sono i romantici ma i realisti. Chiunque può avvertirla nell’opera del signor Rudyard Kipling; e quando una volta feci un’osservazione sul suo repellente piccolo capolavoro intitolato «Il Marchio della Bestia» a un ufficiale anglo-indiano piuttosto cinico, egli osservò cupamente: «È una storia bestiale. Ma quei diavoli sanno davvero fare cose maledettamente strane.» Non è che prendere un esempio banale tra innumerevoli altri più notevoli menzionare i molti testimoni del trucco del mango. Anche qui dobbiamo di tempo in tempo piangere sulla debolezza di mente che frettolosamente lo liquida come la pratica dell’ipnotismo. È come se si chiedesse alla gente di spiegare come un solo Indiano disarmato avesse ucciso trecento uomini, ed essa rispondesse che era solo la pratica del sacrificio umano. Nulla di ciò che conosciamo come ipnotismo consentirà a un uomo di alterare gli occhi nelle teste di un’enorme folla di perfetti sconosciuti; ben desti in pieno giorno; e se è ipnotismo, è qualcosa di così spaventosamente ingigantito da richiedere una nuova magia per spiegare la spiegazione; certamente qualcosa che lo spiega meglio di una parola greca per sonno. Ma l’impressione di questi casi particolari non è che un esempio di un’impressione più universale dell’atmosfera asiatica; e quell’atmosfera stessa è solo un esempio di qualcosa di ancor più vasto per cui sto cercando parole. L’Asia sta per qualcosa che il mondo in Occidente come pure in Oriente avverte sempre più come una presenza, e persino una pressione. Lo si potrebbe chiamare il mondo spirituale scatenato; o una sorta di anarchia psichica; una giungla di piante di mango. Ed esso preme oggi anche sull’Occidente a causa del crollo di certe barriere materialistiche che finora l’hanno trattenuto. In parole chiare, l’atteggiamento della scienza non è soltanto modificato; è ora interamente rovesciato. Non lo dico con mero piacere; per certi versi preferisco il nostro materialismo al loro spiritualismo. Ma nel bene o nel male gli scienziati stanno ora distruggendo il proprio mondo scientifico.
Gli agnostici sono stati respinti sull’agnosticismo; e già si stanno riprendendo dallo shock. Si ritrovano in un mondo davvero ignoto sotto dèi davvero ignoti; un mondo che è più mistico, o almeno più misterioso. Poiché nell’età vittoriana gli agnostici non erano davvero agnostici. Si potrebbero meglio descrivere come materialisti riverenti; o comunque monisti. Avevano almeno, in fondo alla mente, un concetto chiaro e coerente del loro cosmo piuttosto meccanico a orologeria; per questo non potevano ammettere il minimo granello di soprannaturale nel loro meccanismo a orologeria. Ma oggi è assai arduo per un uomo di scienza dire dove finisca il soprannaturale o cominci il naturale, o quale nome si dovrebbe dare all’uno o all’altro. La parola agnostico ha cessato di essere una parola cortese per ateo. È divenuta una parola reale per uno stato mentale ben reale, consapevole di molte possibilità oltre quella dell’ateo, e non escludente quella del politeista. Non è più questione di definire o negare un semplice potere centrale, ma di bilanciare il cervello in uno smarrimento di nuovi poteri che sembrano sovrapporsi e potrebbero persino confliggere. La Natura stessa è divenuta innaturale. Il vento soffia dall’altro lato del deserto, non più col nobile truismo «Non c’è altro Dio che Dio», ma piuttosto con quell’altro motto tratto dalla più profonda anarchia dell’Asia, estratto dal signor Kipling, in forma di proverbio indigeno, nella stessa storia già menzionata: «I tuoi dèi e i miei dèi, sappiamo tu o io quale sia il più forte?» C’era una storia mistica che lessi in qualche luogo nella mia fanciullezza, di cui l’unica immagine che rimane è quella di un cespuglio di rosa che cresceva misteriosamente in mezzo a una stanza. Prendendo questa immagine per amore di argomentazione, possiamo facilmente immaginare un uomo semicosciente e convinto di delirare, o ancora in parte in un sogno, perché vede un tale cespuglio magico crescere irrazionalmente in mezzo alla sua camera da letto. Tutte le pareti e i mobili sono familiari e solidi, il tavolo, l’orologio, il telefono, lo specchio o che altro; non c’è nulla di innaturale tranne quest’unica aleggiante allucinazione o illusione ottica di verde e di rosso. Ora, questa era press’a poco la veduta che si aveva della Rosa di Saron, la rosa mistica della sacra tradizione della Palestina, da parte di qualsiasi uomo colto verso il 1850, quando il razionalismo del Settecento si supponeva avesse trovato pieno appoggio nella scienza dell’Ottocento. Egli aveva un sentimento verso una rosa: era ancora lieto che avesse fragranza o atmosfera; benché ricordasse con un lieve disagio che aveva spine. Ma ciò che lo turbava a suo riguardo era che essa era impossibile. E ciò che gliela faceva ritenere impossibile era che essa era incoerente con tutto il resto. Era un’unica solitaria e mostruosa eccezione a quella specie di regola che non dovrebbe avere eccezioni. La scienza non lo convinceva che vi fossero pochi miracoli, ma che non vi fossero miracoli affatto; e perché mai dovrebbero esserci miracoli solo in Palestina e solo per un breve periodo? Era un’unica e insensata contraddizione a un cosmo per il resto completo. Poiché il mobilio si incastrava pezzo per pezzo e sempre meglio; e la camera da letto sembrava farsi sempre più solida. L’uomo riconosceva il ritratto di se stesso sopra la mensola del camino o le boccette di medicina sul tavolo, come l’amante morente in Browning. In altre parole, la scienza fin lì aveva costantemente solidificato le cose; Newton aveva misurato le pareti e il soffitto e fatto un calcolo delle loro tre dimensioni. Darwin già disponeva gli animali in fila ordinatamente come una fila di sedie, o Faraday gli elementi chimici con la stessa chiarezza di una fila di boccette di medicina. Dalla metà del Settecento alla metà dell’Ottocento, la scienza non solo faceva scoperte, ma tutte le scoperte andavano in una sola direzione. La scienza fa ancora scoperte; ma vanno nella direzione opposta.
For things are rather different when the man in the bed next looks at the bedroom. Not only is the rose-bush still very obvious; but the other things are looking very odd. The perspective seems to have gone crooked; the walls seem to vary in measurement till the man thinks he is going mad. The wall-paper has a new pattern, of strange spirals instead of round dots. The table seems to have moved by itself across the room and thrown the medicine bottles out of the window. The telephone has vanished from the wall; the mirror does not reflect what is in front of it. The portrait of himself over the mantelpiece has a face that is not his own.
That is something like a vision of the vital change in the whole trend of natural philosophy in the last twenty or thirty years. It matters little whether we regard it as the deepening or the destruction of the scientific universe. It matters little whether we say that grander abysses have opened in it, or merely that the bottom has fallen out of it. It is quite self-evident that scientific men are at war with wilder and 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 impression one of common sense. It is really true that the perspective and dimensions of the man’s bedroom have altered; the disciples of Einstein will tell him that straight lines are curved and perhaps measure more 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 turned into the fourth dimension or something entirely different; and the telephone may fairly be said to have faded from view in favour of the invisible telepath. It is true that the pattern of the paper has changed, for the very pattern of the world has changed; we are told that it is not made of atoms like the dots but of electrons like the spirals. Scientific men of the first rank have 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 enough that few still pretend that is entirely done by the spiritualists. I am not dealing with doctrines but with doubts; with the mere fact that all these things have grown deeper and more bewildering. Some people really are throwing their medicine bottles out of the window; and some of them at least are working purely psychological cures of a sort that would once have been called miraculous 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 contact with 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 old dogmas 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 tune of Professor Einstein, even the law of gravity is behaving with lamentable levity.
And when the man looks at the portrait of himself he really does not see himself. He sees his Other Self, which some say is the opposite of his ordinary self; his Subconscious Self or his Subliminal Self, said to rage and rule in his dreams, or a suppressed self which hates him though it is hidden from him; or the Alter Ego of a Dual Personality. It is not to my present purpose to discuss the merit of these 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 been considerably 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 have in 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 into the face of a fiend. When he looks at the bedroom itself, in short, it becomes clearer and clearer that it is exactly this comfortable and 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 seems to smell as well as see; and he stretches forth his hand, and his finger bleeds upon a thorn.
It will not be altogether surprising if the story ends with the man recovering full consciousness, and finding he has been convalescing in a hammock in a rose-garden. It is not so very unreasonable when you come to 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 inconsistent with the other. Now the whole of the rationalistic doubt about the Palestinian legends, from its rise in the early eighteenth century out of the last movements of the Renascence, was founded on the fixity of facts. Miracles were monstrosities because they were against natural law, which was necessarily immutable law. The prodigies of the Old Testament or the mighty works of the New were extravagances because they were exceptions; and they were exceptions because there was a rule, and that an immutable rule. In short, there was no rose-tree growing out of the carpet of a trim and tidy bedroom; because rose-trees do not grow out of carpets in trim and tidy bedrooms. So far it seemed reasonable enough. But it left out one possibility; that a man can dream about a room as well as a rose; and that a man can doubt about a rule as well as an exception.
Poiché le cose sono alquanto diverse quando l’uomo nel letto guarda poi la camera. Non solo il cespuglio di rosa è ancora ben evidente; ma le altre cose hanno un aspetto assai bizzarro. La prospettiva sembra essersi storta; le pareti sembrano variare di misura finché l’uomo crede di impazzire. La carta da parati ha un nuovo disegno, di strane spirali invece che di tondi puntini. Il tavolo sembra essersi mosso da solo attraverso la stanza e aver gettato le boccette di medicina fuori dalla finestra. Il telefono è svanito dal muro; lo specchio non riflette ciò che gli sta davanti. Il ritratto di se stesso sopra la mensola del camino ha un volto che non è il suo.
Questo è qualcosa come una visione del mutamento vitale in tutto l’andamento della filosofia naturale negli ultimi venti o trent’anni. Importa poco se lo consideriamo come l’approfondimento o la distruzione dell’universo scientifico. Importa poco se diciamo che vi si sono aperti abissi più grandiosi, o semplicemente che gliene è caduto il fondo. È del tutto evidente di per sé che gli uomini di scienza sono in guerra con fantasie più sfrenate e più insondabili dei fatti dell’età di Huxley. Non tento alcuna controversia su nessuno dei casi particolari: è l’effetto cumulativo di tutti loro che rende l’impressione una cosa di buon senso. È davvero vero che la prospettiva e le dimensioni della camera da letto dell’uomo sono mutate; i discepoli di Einstein gli diranno che le linee rette sono curve e forse misurano più in un verso che nell’altro; se questo non è un incubo, che cosa lo è? È davvero vero che l’orologio è mutato, poiché il tempo si è trasformato nella quarta dimensione o in qualcosa di interamente diverso; e si può ben dire che il telefono sia svanito dalla vista in favore dell’invisibile telepate. È vero che il disegno della carta è cambiato, poiché il disegno stesso del mondo è cambiato; ci si dice che non è fatto di atomi come i puntini ma di elettroni come le spirali. Uomini di scienza di primo rango hanno visto un tavolo muoversi da solo, e salire le scale da solo. Qui non importa se fu opera degli spiriti; basta che pochi pretendano ancora che sia interamente opera degli spiritisti. Non tratto di dottrine ma di dubbi; del mero fatto che tutte queste cose si sono fatte più profonde e più sconcertanti. Alcuni davvero gettano le loro boccette di medicina fuori dalla finestra; e almeno alcuni di loro operano cure puramente psicologiche di una specie che un tempo si sarebbe chiamata guarigione miracolosa. Non dico che sappiamo fino a che punto ciò potrebbe spingersi; è tutto il mio argomento che non lo sappiamo, che siamo in contatto con quantità di cose nuove di cui sappiamo straordinariamente poco. Ma il punto vitale è, non che la scienza tratti di ciò che non sappiamo, ma che la scienza sta distruggendo ciò che credevamo di sapere. Quasi tutte le più recenti scoperte sono state distruttive, non dei vecchi dogmi della religione, ma piuttosto dei recenti dogmi della scienza. La conservazione dell’energia non poté essere essa stessa interamente conservata. L’atomo fu ridotto in atomi. E danzando al motivo del professor Einstein, persino la legge di gravità si comporta con deplorevole leggerezza.
E quando l’uomo guarda il ritratto di se stesso, davvero non vede se stesso. Vede il suo Altro Sé, che alcuni dicono essere l’opposto del suo sé ordinario; il suo Sé Subconscio o il suo Sé Subliminale, che si dice infurii e regni nei suoi sogni, o un sé represso che lo odia benché gli sia nascosto; o l’Alter Ego di una Personalità Duplice. Non rientra nel mio presente scopo discutere il merito di queste speculazioni, o se esse siano medicinali o morbose. Il mio scopo è servito nel rilevare il semplice fatto storico; che se aveste parlato a un Utilitarista e Razionalista del tempo di Bentham, che diceva agli uomini di seguire l’«illuminato interesse per il sé», egli sarebbe stato notevolmente sconcertato se gli aveste risposto vivacemente e prontamente: «E a quale sé vi riferite; il subconscio, il conscio, quello latentemente criminale o represso, o altri che fortunatamente teniamo in serbo?» Quando l’uomo guarda il proprio ritratto nella propria camera da letto, esso si dissolve davvero nel volto di uno straniero o guizza nel volto di un demonio. Quando guarda la camera stessa, in breve, si fa sempre più chiaro che è esattamente questa parte comoda e solida della visione a mutare e a disgregarsi. Sono le pareti e i mobili a essere soltanto un sogno o un ricordo. E quando guarda di nuovo l’incongruo cespuglio di rosa, gli sembra di odorare come pure di vedere; e stende la mano, e il suo dito sanguina su una spina.
Non sarà del tutto sorprendente se la storia si conclude con l’uomo che ricupera piena coscienza, e scopre di essere stato in convalescenza in un’amaca tra le rose di un giardino. Non è poi così irragionevole a pensarci bene; o almeno quando si arriva a pensarlo nel suo insieme. Non aveva torto nel pensare che il tutto dovesse essere un tutto coerente, e che una parte sembrasse incoerente con l’altra. Aveva torto soltanto su quale parte fosse quella sbagliata per essere incoerente con l’altra. Ora, tutto il dubbio razionalistico riguardo alle leggende palestinesi, dal suo sorgere nel primo Settecento dagli ultimi movimenti del Rinascimento, era fondato sulla fissità dei fatti. I miracoli erano mostruosità perché erano contro la legge naturale, che era necessariamente legge immutabile. I prodigi dell’Antico Testamento o le possenti opere del Nuovo erano stravaganze perché erano eccezioni; ed erano eccezioni perché c’era una regola, e per giunta una regola immutabile. In breve, non c’era alcun cespo di rosa che spuntasse dal tappeto di una camera da letto linda e ordinata; perché i cespi di rosa non spuntano dai tappeti nelle camere da letto linde e ordinate. Fin qui sembrava abbastanza ragionevole. Ma tralasciava una possibilità; che un uomo può sognare una stanza come pure una rosa; e che un uomo può dubitare di una regola come pure di un’eccezione.
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 marvels as impossible, in face of the new marvels which they had to admit as possible. They were themselves dealing now with a number of unknown quantities; what is the power of mind over matter; when is matter 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 no longer watertight; that floods were coming in from somewhere in which they were already out of their depth, and down among very fantastical deep-sea fishes. They could hardly feel certain even about the fish that swallowed Jonah, when they had no test except the very true one 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 line at 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 gravity and the fable of the Ascension. They cannot all be made to see any such contrast between the levitation that is now discussed as a possibility 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 doubts and possibilities to have authority to define the difference. I say the more it knows of what seems to have happened, or what is said to have happened, in many modern drawing-rooms, the less it knows 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 the New Testament I am not directly concerned till the next chapter; and the matter here is a more general one. The truth is that through a thousand channels something has returned to the modern mind. It is not Christianity. On the contrary, it would be truer to say that it is paganism. In reality it is in a very special sense paganism; because it is polytheism. The word will startle many people, but not the people who know the modern world best. When I told a distinguished psychologist at Oxford that I differed from his view of the universe, he answered, “Why universe? Why should it not be a multiverse?” The essence of polytheism is the worship of gods who are not God; that is, who are not necessarily the author and the authority of all things. Men are feeling more and 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 really more like a daemon. He called his book God, the Invisible King; but the curious point was that he specially insisted that his God differed from other people’s God in the very fact that he was not a king. He was very particular in explaining that his deity did not rule 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 his one devoted worshipper; and that, as if in old Greece, a glad cry might 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 mean this disrespectfully, but on the contrary very sympathetically; I think it worthy of so great a man to appreciate and answer the general sense of a richer and more adventurous spiritual world around us. It is a great emancipation from the leaden materialism which weighed on men of imagination forty years ago. But my point for the moment is that the mode of the emancipation was pagan or even polytheistic, in the real philosophical sense that it was the selection of a single spirit, out of many there might be in the spiritual world. The point is that while Mr. Wells worships his god (who is not his creator or even necessarily his overlord) there is nothing to prevent Mr. William Archer, also emancipated, from adoring another god in another temple; or Mr. Arnold Bennett, should he similarly liberate his mind, from bowing down to a third god in a third temple. My imagination rather fails me, I confess, in evoking the image and symbolism of Mr. Bennett’s or Mr. Archer’s idolatries; and if I had to choose between the three, I should probably be found as an acolyte in the shrine of Mr. Wells. But, anyhow, the trend of all this is to polytheism, rather as it existed in the old civilisation of paganism.
There is the same modern mark in Spiritualism. Spiritualism also has the trend of polytheism, if it be in a form more akin to ancestor-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 merely describing the drift of the day; and it seems clear that it is towards the summoning of spirits to our aid whatever their position in the unknown 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 powers of 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 sneer at the identity of the word agnosticism with the word ignorance. On the contrary, I think ignorance the greater thing; for ignorance can be creative. And the thing it can create, and soon probably will create, is one of the lost arts of the world; a mythology.
Non appena gli uomini di scienza cominciarono a dubitare delle regole del gioco, il gioco era finito. Non potevano più escludere tutte le vecchie meraviglie come impossibili, di fronte alle nuove meraviglie che dovevano ammettere come possibili. Essi stessi trattavano ormai con una serie di quantità ignote; qual è il potere della mente sulla materia; quando è la materia un’illusione della mente; che cos’è l’identità, che cos’è l’individualità, c’è un limite alla logica negli estremi ultimi della matematica? Sapevano da cento indizi che il loro mondo non miracoloso non era più a tenuta stagna; che entravano da qualche parte flutti nei quali erano già oltre la loro portata, e giù tra pesci abissali quanto mai fantastici. Potevano a stento sentirsi certi persino riguardo al pesce che inghiottì Giona, quando non avevano altra prova se non quella verissima che ci sono più pesci nel mare di quanti ne siano mai usciti. Logicamente troverebbero altrettanto arduo tracciare il confine alla miracolosa pesca abbondante. Non intendo che essi, e nemmeno io, abbiamo qui bisogno di dipendere da quelle storie particolari; intendo che la difficoltà ora è tracciare un confine, e un confine nuovo, dopo la cancellazione di un vecchio confine assai più ovvio. Chiunque può tracciarlo per sé, come questione di mero gusto nella probabilità; ma non abbiamo fatto una filosofia finché non possiamo tracciarlo per gli altri. E i moderni uomini di scienza non possono tracciarlo per gli altri. Gli uomini potevano facilmente segnare il contrasto tra la forza di gravità e la favola dell’Ascensione. Non tutti possono essere indotti a vedere un tale contrasto tra la levitazione che ora si discute come possibilità e l’ascensione che ancora si deride come miracolo. Non dico nemmeno che non vi sia una grande differenza tra loro; dico che la scienza è ora immersa troppo a fondo in nuovi dubbi e possibilità per avere l’autorità di definire la differenza. Dico che quanto più essa conosce di ciò che sembra essere accaduto, o che si dice sia accaduto, in molti salotti moderni, tanto meno sa ciò che accadde o non accadde su quel colle elevato e leggendario, dove una guglia si erge sopra Gerusalemme e può essere veduta oltre il Giordano.
Ma di quella parte della storia palestinese che è narrata nel Nuovo Testamento non mi occupo direttamente fino al prossimo capitolo; e la questione qui è più generale. La verità è che attraverso mille canali qualcosa è ritornato alla mente moderna. Non è il Cristianesimo. Al contrario, sarebbe più vero dire che è il paganesimo. In realtà è paganesimo in un senso molto particolare; perché è politeismo. La parola farà trasalire molti, ma non coloro che conoscono meglio il mondo moderno. Quando dissi a un illustre psicologo di Oxford che dissentivo dalla sua veduta dell’universo, egli rispose: «Perché universo? Perché non dovrebbe essere un multiverso?» L’essenza del politeismo è il culto di dèi che non sono Dio; cioè, che non sono necessariamente l’autore e l’autorità di tutte le cose. Gli uomini sentono sempre più che vi sono molte forze spirituali nell’universo, e i più saggi sentono che di alcune ci si può fidare più che di altre. Vi sarà una tendenza, credo, a scegliere una forza prediletta, o in altre parole uno spirito familiare. Il signor H. G. Wells, che è, se qualcuno lo è, un genio tra i moderni e un moderno tra i geni, fece davvero proprio questo; scelse un dio che somigliava in realtà più a un dèmone. Intitolò il suo libro God, the Invisible King; ma il punto curioso era che egli insisteva in modo particolare sul fatto che il suo Dio differiva dal Dio degli altri proprio per il fatto di non essere un re. Fu assai preciso nello spiegare che la sua divinità non governava in alcun senso onnipotente o infinito; ma semplicemente influiva, come qualsiasi spirito errante. Né era particolarmente invisibile, se si può dire che vi siano gradi nell’invisibilità. Il Dio Invisibile del signor Wells era in realtà come l’Uomo Invisibile del signor Wells. Quasi si sentiva che egli potesse apparire da un momento all’altro, almeno al suo unico devoto adoratore; e che, come nell’antica Grecia, un lieto grido potesse risuonare per i boschi dell’Essex, la voce del signor Wells che gridava: «Abbiamo visto, egli ci ha visti, un Dio visibile.» Non lo dico irriverentemente, ma al contrario con molta simpatia; ritengo degno di un uomo tanto grande apprezzare e rispondere al senso generale di un mondo spirituale più ricco e più avventuroso attorno a noi. È una grande emancipazione dal plumbeo materialismo che gravava sugli uomini di immaginazione quarant’anni fa. Ma il mio punto per il momento è che il modo dell’emancipazione era pagano o persino politeistico, nel vero senso filosofico che era la scelta di un solo spirito, tra i molti che potrebbero esservi nel mondo spirituale. Il punto è che, mentre il signor Wells adora il suo dio (che non è il suo creatore né necessariamente il suo signore), nulla impedisce al signor William Archer, anch’egli emancipato, di adorare un altro dio in un altro tempio; o al signor Arnold Bennett, qualora liberasse similmente la sua mente, di prostrarsi a un terzo dio in un terzo tempio. La mia immaginazione mi vien meno, lo confesso, nell’evocare l’immagine e il simbolismo delle idolatrie del signor Bennett o del signor Archer; e se dovessi scegliere tra i tre, probabilmente mi si troverebbe come accolito nel santuario del signor Wells. Ma, comunque, la tendenza di tutto ciò è verso il politeismo, press’a poco come esisteva nell’antica civiltà del paganesimo.
Vi è lo stesso segno moderno nello Spiritismo. Anche lo Spiritismo ha la tendenza al politeismo, se pure in una forma più affine al culto degli antenati. Ma sia che si tratti dell’invocazione di fantasmi o di dèi, il suo segno è che invoca qualcosa di meno del divino; né me ne dolgo affatto per questo. Sto soltanto descrivendo la corrente del tempo presente; e sembra chiaro che essa vada verso l’evocazione di spiriti in nostro aiuto quale che sia la loro posizione nel mondo ignoto, e senza alcun chiaro disegno dottrinale di quel mondo. Il risultato più probabile sembrerebbe essere una moltitudine di culti psichici, personali e impersonali, dalla più vaga reverenza per le potenze della natura al più concreto ricorso ai cristalli o ai portafortuna. Quando dico che gli agnostici hanno scoperto l’agnosticismo, e ora si sono ripresi dallo shock, non intendo semplicemente sogghignare sull’identità della parola agnosticismo con la parola ignoranza. Al contrario, ritengo l’ignoranza la cosa più grande; poiché l’ignoranza può essere creativa. E la cosa che essa può creare, e presto probabilmente creerà, è una delle arti perdute del mondo; una mitologia.
In a word, the modern world will probably end exactly where the Bible begins. In that inevitable setting of spirit against spirit, or god against god, we shall soon be in a position to do more justice not only to the New Testament, but to the Old Testament. Our descendants may very possibly do the very thing we scoff at the old Jews for doing; grope for and cling to their own deity as one rising above rivals who seem to be equally real. They also may feel him not primarily as the sole or even the supreme but only as the best; and have to abide the miracles of ages to prove that he is also the mightiest. For them also he may at first be felt as their own, before he is extended to others; he also, from the collision with colossal idolatries and towering spiritual tyrannies, may emerge only as a God of Battles and a Lord of Hosts. Here between the dark wastes and the clouded mountain was fought out what must seem even to the indifferent a wrestle of giants driving the world out of its course; Jehovah of the mountains casting down Baal of the desert and Dagon of the sea. Here wandered and endured that strange and terrible and tenacious people who held high 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 beyond our understanding, had rightly chosen among the powers invisible, and found their choice a great god above all gods. So the future may suffer not from the loss but the multiplicity of faith; and its fate be far more like the cloudy and mythological war in 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 leading up to a lasting truth; and that it will once again be justified of all its children. What has survived through an age of atheism as the most indestructible would survive through an age of polytheism as the most indispensable. If among many gods it could not presently be 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 polytheist as sung by the neo-pagan poet, is a test which that incarnate mystery will abide the best. And however much or little our spiritual inquirers may lift the veil from their invisible kings, they will not find a vision more vivid than a man walking unveiled upon the mountains, seen of men and seeing; a visible god.
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In una parola, il mondo moderno finirà probabilmente esattamente dove la Bibbia comincia. In quell’inevitabile schierarsi di spirito contro spirito, o di dio contro dio, ci troveremo presto in condizione di rendere maggior giustizia non solo al Nuovo Testamento, ma anche all’Antico Testamento. I nostri discendenti potrebbero benissimo fare proprio ciò di cui deridiamo gli antichi Ebrei; brancolare verso, e aggrapparsi al, proprio dio come a uno che si erge sopra rivali che paiono altrettanto reali. Anch’essi potrebbero sentirlo non anzitutto come l’unico o persino il supremo, ma solo come il migliore; e dover attendere i miracoli delle epoche per provare che è anche il più potente. Anche per loro, dapprima egli potrà essere sentito come proprio, prima di essere esteso ad altri; anch’egli, dalla collisione con colossali idolatrie e torreggianti tirannie spirituali, potrà emergere solo come un Dio delle Battaglie e un Signore degli Eserciti. Qui, tra le distese oscure e la montagna avvolta di nubi, si combatté ciò che deve apparire persino all’indifferente una lotta di giganti capace di deviare il mondo dal suo corso; il Jehovah dei monti che abbatte il Baal del deserto e il Dagon del mare. Qui vagò e resistette quel popolo strano e terribile e tenace che teneva alta al di sopra di tutte le sue virtù e i suoi vizi un’unica idea indistruttibile; che essi non erano che strumenti in quella mano tremenda. Qui fu il primo trionfo di coloro che, in un senso al di là della nostra comprensione, avevano rettamente scelto tra le potenze invisibili, e trovarono la loro scelta un grande dio al di sopra di tutti gli dèi. Così il futuro potrà soffrire non della perdita ma della molteplicità della fede; e il suo destino essere assai più simile alla guerra nebulosa e mitologica nel deserto che alla secca radianza del teismo o del monismo. Non ho detto nulla qui della mia fede, né di quel nome sul quale, ne sono ben persuaso, il mondo farà somma saggezza a invocare. Ma credo davvero che la tradizione fondata in quella lontana battaglia tribale, in quella lontana terra d’Oriente, si sia in effetti giustificata conducendo fino a una verità duratura; e che sarà ancora una volta giustificata da tutti i suoi figli. Ciò che è sopravvissuto attraverso un’epoca di ateismo come la cosa più indistruttibile sopravvivrebbe attraverso un’epoca di politeismo come la più indispensabile. Se tra molti dèi non potesse per il momento provarsi il più forte, alcuni saprebbero comunque che è il migliore. La sua presenza centrale perdurerebbe attraverso tempi di nube e confusione, in cui fosse giudicata solo come un mito tra i miti o un uomo tra gli uomini. Persino l’antica prova pagana dell’umanità e l’apparizione del corpo, riguardo alla quale ho citato il verso sul politeista pagano cantato dal poeta neo-pagano, è una prova che quel mistero incarnato sosterrà meglio di ogni altro. E per quanto tanto o poco i nostri indagatori spirituali possano sollevare il velo dai loro re invisibili, non troveranno una visione più viva di un uomo che cammina senza velo sui monti, visto dagli uomini e vedente; un dio visibile.
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CHAPTER IX
THE BATTLE WITH THE DRAGON
Lydda or Ludd has already been noted as the legendary birthplace of St. George, and as the camp on the edge of the desert from which, as it happened, I caught the first glimpse of the coloured fields of Palestine that looked like the fields of Paradise. Being an encampment of soldiers, it seems an appropriate place for St. George; and indeed it may be said that all that red and empty land has 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 innocent and imitative enthusiasm, made the Moslems also half-accept a sort of Christian mythology, and make an abstract hero of St. George. It is said that Coeur de Lion on these very sands first invoked the soldier saint to bless the English battle-line, and blazon his cross on the English banners. But the name occurs not only in the stories of the victory of Richard, but in the enemy stories that led up to the great victory of Saladin. In that obscure and violent quarrel which let loose the disaster of Hattin, when the Grand Master of the Templars, Gerard the Englishman from Bideford in Devon, drove with demented heroism his few lances against a host, there fell among those radiant fanatics one Christian warrior, who had made with his single sword such a circle of the slain, that the victorious Moslems treated even his dead body as something supernatural; and bore it away with them with honour, saying it was the body of 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 more fantastic story of St. George and the Dragon. The symbolic struggle between man and monster might very well take place somewhere where the green culture of the fields meets the red desolation of the desert. As a matter of fact, I dare say, legend locates the duel itself somewhere 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 it here 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 paradox has already been touched on in the last chapter about polytheistic spirits or superstitions such as surrounded the Old Testament, but it is yet more true of the criticisms and apologetics surrounding the New Testament. And the paradox is this; that we never find our 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 we are 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 abrupt as a refutation. That is the point about the wireless telegraphy or wordless telepathy of the Bedouins. A supernatural trick in a dingy tribe wandering in dry places is not the sort of supernaturalism we 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 mere fairy-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 to the conclusion that there probably was such a person as St. George, in spite of all the nonsense about dragons and the chimera with wings and 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 that early Christianity, so far from being a religion of pacifists, was largely a religion of soldiers. Anyhow he thinks St. George himself 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 of the legendary combat; and finds comparatively few or faint traces of the personality of St. George. But suppose he does find, on that very field of combat, the bones of a gigantic monster unlike every other creature except the legendary dragon. Or suppose he only finds ancient Eastern sculptures and hieroglyphics representing maidens, being sacrificed to such a monster, and making it quite clear that even within historic times one of those sacrificed was a princess. It is surely clear that he will be considerably impressed by this confirmation, not of the part he did believe, but actually of the part he did not believe. He has not found what he expected but 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. George and the Dragon.
It is needless to inform the reader, I trust, that I do not think this particular case in the least likely; or that I am only using it for the sake of lucidity. Even as it stands, it would not necessarily make a man believe the traditional story, but it would make him guess that it was some sort of tradition of some sort of truth; that there was something in it, and much more in it than even he himself had imagined. And the point of it would be precisely that 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 had taught him the fantastic part. He will certainly conclude that the whole story is very much more valid than anybody has supposed. Now as I have already said, it is not in the least likely that this will happen touching this particular tale of Palestine. But this is precisely what really has happened touching the 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 only ornamental symbols; and by the right of whose tragedy even St. George’s Cross does not belong to St. George. It is not likely to 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 Christ and His mastery of the powers of darkness, that this very paradox has proved itself a fact.
CAPITOLO IX
LA BATTAGLIA CON IL DRAGO
Lidda o Ludd è già stata segnalata come il luogo natale leggendario di San Giorgio, e come l’accampamento sull’orlo del deserto dal quale, come accadde, colsi il primo scorcio dei campi variopinti della Palestina che parevano i campi del Paradiso. Essendo un accampamento di soldati, sembra un luogo appropriato per San Giorgio; e in verità si può dire che tutta quella terra rossa e vuota abbia risonato del suo nome come uno scudo di rame o di bronzo. Il nome non era confinato neppure alle grida dei cristiani; una curiosa ospitalità immaginativa nella mente musulmana, un certo innocente e imitativo entusiasmo, indusse anche i musulmani a semi-accettare una sorta di mitologia cristiana, e a fare di San Giorgio un eroe astratto. Si dice che Cuor di Leone proprio su queste sabbie invocò per primo il santo soldato affinché benedicesse la linea di battaglia inglese e blasonasse la sua croce sui vessilli inglesi. Ma il nome ricorre non solo nelle storie della vittoria di Riccardo, bensì anche nelle storie nemiche che condussero alla grande vittoria del Saladino. In quella oscura e violenta contesa che scatenò il disastro di Hattin, quando il Gran Maestro dei Templari, Gerardo l’Inglese di Bideford nel Devon, spinse con demente eroismo le sue poche lance contro un’oste, cadde tra quei fanatici radiosi un guerriero cristiano, il quale aveva tracciato con la sua sola spada un tale cerchio di uccisi, che i musulmani vittoriosi trattarono perfino il suo corpo morto come qualcosa di soprannaturale; e lo portarono via con sé con onore, dicendo che era il corpo di San Giorgio.
Ma se lo scopo dell’accampamento è appropriato alla storia di San Giorgio, la posizione dell’accampamento potrebbe essere considerata appropriata alla più fantastica storia di San Giorgio e il Drago. La lotta simbolica tra l’uomo e il mostro potrebbe assai bene svolgersi in qualche luogo dove la verde coltura dei campi incontra la rossa desolazione del deserto. In verità, oso dire, la leggenda colloca il duello stesso altrove, ma io mi servo della leggenda solo come leggenda, o anche come comoda figura retorica. La userei qui soltanto per comporre una sorta di quadro che possa chiarire una sorta di paradosso, assai vitale per il nostro attuale atteggiamento verso tutte le tradizioni palestinesi, comprese quelle che sono più sacre perfino di San Giorgio. Questo paradosso è già stato sfiorato nel capitolo precedente a proposito degli spiriti o delle superstizioni politeistiche quali circondavano l’Antico Testamento, ma è ancor più vero delle critiche e dell’apologetica che circondano il Nuovo Testamento. E il paradosso è questo: che non troviamo mai la nostra religione così giusta come quando scopriamo di aver avuto torto su di essa. Voglio dire che veniamo infine convinti non dal genere di prova che stavamo cercando, ma dal genere di prova che non stavamo cercando. Siamo convinti quando ci imbattiamo in una ratifica quasi altrettanto brusca di una confutazione. Questo è il punto riguardo alla telegrafia senza fili o telepatia senza parole dei beduini. Un trucco soprannaturale in una lurida tribù errante per luoghi aridi non è il genere di soprannaturale che ci aspetteremmo di trovare; è soltanto il genere che di fatto troviamo. Queste rocce del deserto, come le ossa di un gigante sepolto, non paiono sporgere là dove dovrebbero, ma sporgono, e noi vi inciampiamo.
Qualunque cosa pensiamo di San Giorgio, la maggior parte delle persone vedrebbe una mera fiaba in San Giorgio e il Drago. Oso dire che hanno ragione; e io lo uso qui soltanto come figura per amor di argomentazione. Ma supponiamo, per amor di argomentazione, che un uomo sia giunto alla conclusione che probabilmente esistette davvero una persona quale San Giorgio, a dispetto di tutte le sciocchezze sui draghi e sulla chimera con ali e artigli che in qualche modo si è intrecciata alla sua immagine. Forse egli è un poco influenzato dal patriottismo o da altri fini etici; e ritiene il santo un buon ideale sociale. Forse sa che il primo Cristianesimo, lungi dall’essere una religione di pacifisti, era in gran parte una religione di soldati. Comunque sia, ritiene San Giorgio in persona una figura abbastanza solida e storica; e ha ben poco dubbio che di lui si possano trovare documenti o tracce. Ora il punto è questo: supponiamo che quell’uomo si rechi nella terra del combattimento leggendario; e vi trovi tracce comparativamente scarse o labili della personalità di San Giorgio. Ma supponiamo che egli trovi, proprio su quel campo di battaglia, le ossa di un gigantesco mostro diverso da ogni altra creatura eccetto il leggendario drago. Oppure supponiamo che trovi soltanto antiche sculture e geroglifici orientali raffiguranti fanciulle sacrificate a un tale mostro, e che rendano del tutto chiaro che perfino entro tempi storici una di quelle sacrificate fu una principessa. È certo chiaro che egli sarà notevolmente colpito da questa conferma, non della parte in cui credeva, ma proprio della parte in cui non credeva. Non ha trovato ciò che si aspettava, ma ha trovato ciò che voleva, e molto più di quanto volesse. Non ha trovato un solo dettaglio direttamente a sostegno di San Giorgio. Ma ha trovato un sostegno assai considerevole di San Giorgio e il Drago.
È inutile informare il lettore, confido, che non ritengo questo caso particolare minimamente probabile; o che lo uso soltanto per amor di chiarezza. Anche così com’è, non farebbe necessariamente credere a un uomo la storia tradizionale, ma gli farebbe supporre che vi fosse una qualche sorta di tradizione di una qualche sorta di verità; che vi fosse qualcosa in essa, e molto più di quanto egli stesso avesse immaginato. E il punto della cosa sarebbe precisamente che la sua ragione non aveva anticipato l’ampiezza della sua rivelazione. Egli ha provato l’improbabile, non la cosa probabile. La ragione gli aveva già insegnato la parte ragionevole; ma i fatti gli avevano insegnato la parte fantastica. Concluderà certamente che l’intera storia è assai più valida di quanto chiunque abbia supposto. Ora, come ho già detto, non è minimamente probabile che ciò accada a proposito di questo particolare racconto della Palestina. Ma questo è precisamente ciò che è realmente accaduto a proposito del più sacro e tremendo di tutti i racconti della Palestina. Questo è precisamente ciò che è accaduto a proposito di quella figura centrale, attorno alla quale il mostro e il campione sono del pari soltanto simboli ornamentali; e per diritto della cui tragedia perfino la Croce di San Giorgio non appartiene a San Giorgio. Non è probabile che sia vero del duello nel deserto tra Giorgio e il Drago; ma è già vero del duello nel deserto tra Gesù e il Diavolo. San Giorgio non è che un servo e il Drago non è che un simbolo, ma è precisamente riguardo alla realtà centrale, il mistero di Cristo e del suo dominio sulle potenze delle tenebre, che proprio questo paradosso si è dimostrato un fatto.
Going down from Jerusalem to Jericho I was more than once moved by a flippant and possibly profane memory of the swine that rushed down a steep place into the sea. I do not insist on the personal parallel; for whatever my points of resemblance to a pig I 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 to the Dead Sea does really involve rushing down a steep place. Indeed it gives a strange impression that the whole of Palestine is one single steep place. It is as if all other countries lay flat under the sky, but this one country had been tilted sideways. This gigantic gesture of geography or geology, this sweep as of a universal landslide, is the sort of thing that is never conveyed by any maps or books or even pictures. All the pictures of Palestine I have seen are descriptive details, groups of costume or 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 roads among ribbed and columned cliffs; but the roads below soon failed us altogether; and the car had to tumble like a tank over rocky banks and into empty river-beds, long before it came to the sinister and discoloured landscapes of the Dead Sea. And the distance looks far 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 gets out beyond Jordan in the wild country of the Shereef he can still look back and see, small and faint as if in the clouds, the spire of 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 mystery of that larger sea. I even had the fancy that one might fish for 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 text for the central controversy of the Victorian Age between Christianity and criticism. The two champions were two of the greatest men of the nineteenth century; Huxley representing scientific scepticism and Gladstone scriptural orthodoxy. The scriptural champion was universally regarded as standing for the past, if not for the dead past; and the scientific champion as standing for the future, if not the final judgment of the world. And yet the future has been entirely different to anything that anybody expected; and the final judgment may yet reverse all the conceptions of their contemporaries and even of themselves. The philosophical position now 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 world was going, and the probable position of the next generation. What he thought indisputable is disputed; and what he thought dead is rather too much alive.
Huxley was not only a man of genius in logic and rhetoric; he was a man of a very manly and generous morality. Morally he deserves much more sympathy than many of the mystics who have supplanted him. But they have supplanted him. In the more mental fashions of 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 it as his purpose to purge the Christian ideal, which he thought self-evidently sublime, of the Christian demonology, which he thought self-evidently ridiculous. And yet if we take any typical man of the next generation, we shall very probably find Huxley’s sublime thing scoffed at, and Huxley’s ridiculous thing taken seriously. I imagine a very typical child of the age succeeding Huxley’s may be found in Mr. George Moore. He has one of the most critical, appreciative and atmospheric talents of the age. He has lived in most of 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 it with peculiar pomp and pride; he would consider himself the freest of all freethinkers. Let us take him as a type and a test of what has really 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, 0 man, that which is good”; and asked scornfully whether anybody was ever likely to suggest that justice was worthless or that mercy was unlovable, and whether anything would diminish the distance between ourselves and 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 admired for 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 somewhat varying ideals were only interesting because they had belonged to himself. Some of this, it is true, was only in the Confessions of a Young Man; but it is the whole point here that they were then the confessions of a young man, and that Huxley’s in comparison were the confessions of an old man. The trend of the new time, in very varying degrees, was tending to undermine, not merely the Christian demonology, not merely the Christian theology, not merely the Christian religion, but definitely the Christian ethical ideal, which had seemed to the great agnostic as secure as the stars.
Scendendo da Gerusalemme a Gerico fui più di una volta commosso da un ricordo frivolo e forse profano dei porci che si precipitarono giù per un pendio scosceso nel mare. Non insisto sul parallelo personale; poiché, quali che siano i miei punti di somiglianza con un porco, non sono un porco volante, un porco con ali di velocità e precipitazione; e se sono posseduto da un demonio, non è il tetro demonio del suicidio. Ma la frase mi tornò in mente perché scendere al Mar Morto comporta davvero precipitarsi giù per un pendio scosceso. Anzi dà la strana impressione che l’intera Palestina sia un unico solo pendio scosceso. È come se tutti gli altri paesi giacessero piatti sotto il cielo, ma questo unico paese fosse stato inclinato di traverso. Questo gigantesco gesto di geografia o geologia, questo slancio come di una frana universale, è il genere di cosa che non viene mai reso da nessuna mappa o libro o perfino immagine. Tutte le immagini della Palestina che ho visto sono dettagli descrittivi, gruppi di costumi o angoli di architettura, tutt’al più vedute di luoghi famosi; non possono dare la visione senza fondo di questa lunga discesa. Andammo in una piccola e traballante automobile Ford giù per strade ripide e frastagliate tra rupi costolute e colonnate; ma le strade più in basso presto ci vennero meno del tutto; e l’automobile dovette ruzzolare come un carro armato su banchi rocciosi e dentro vuoti letti di fiume, molto prima di giungere ai paesaggi sinistri e scoloriti del Mar Morto. E la distanza appare abbastanza lunga sulla mappa, e sembra abbastanza lunga nel viaggio in automobile, da far sentire a un uomo di essere giunto in un’altra parte del mondo; eppure è tutto talmente un’unica sola caduta di terra che perfino quando egli esce oltre il Giordano nella selvaggia contrada dello Sceriffo può ancora voltarsi indietro e vedere, piccola e fioca come tra le nubi, la guglia della chiesa russa (immagino) sul colle dell’Ascensione. E benché la storia dei porci sia in verità legata a un altro luogo, ne restavo tuttavia ossessionato per la sua fantasiosa appropriatezza a questo, a causa della ripidezza stessa di questo più vasto declivio e del mistero di quel più vasto mare. Ebbi persino la fantasia che si potesse pescarli e trovarli in un tale mare, mutati in mostri; porci di mare o pesci a quattro zampe, gonfi e con occhi malvagi, ricoperti di alghe marine a mo’ di setole; i fantasmi di Gadara.
E poi mi tornò in mente, come curiosità e quasi coincidenza, che la medesima strana storia era stata effettivamente scelta come testo per la controversia centrale dell’età vittoriana tra il Cristianesimo e la critica. I due campioni furono due dei più grandi uomini del diciannovesimo secolo; Huxley a rappresentare lo scetticismo scientifico e Gladstone l’ortodossia scritturale. Il campione delle Scritture era universalmente considerato come colui che stava per il passato, se non per il passato morto; e il campione scientifico come colui che stava per il futuro, se non per il giudizio finale del mondo. Eppure il futuro è stato del tutto diverso da qualunque cosa chiunque si aspettasse; e il giudizio finale potrebbe ancora rovesciare tutte le concezioni dei loro contemporanei e persino le loro proprie. La posizione filosofica ora è, in un modo assai curioso, il contrario della posizione di allora. Gladstone ebbe la peggio nella disputa, e si è dimostrato aver ragione. Huxley ebbe la meglio nella disputa, e si è dimostrato aver torto. In ogni caso si è dimostrato in ultimo aver torto riguardo alla direzione in cui il mondo andava, e alla probabile posizione della generazione successiva. Ciò che egli riteneva indiscutibile è discusso; e ciò che riteneva morto è piuttosto troppo vivo.
Huxley non era soltanto un uomo di genio nella logica e nella retorica; era un uomo di moralità assai virile e generosa. Moralmente merita assai più simpatia di molti dei mistici che l’hanno soppiantato. Ma essi l’hanno soppiantato. Nelle mode più mentali dell’epoca, la maggior parte di ciò che egli riteneva sarebbe rimasto in piedi è caduta, e la maggior parte di ciò che riteneva sarebbe caduto è tuttora in piedi. Nella controversia gadarena con Gladstone, egli dichiarò come suo scopo quello di purgare l’ideale cristiano, che riteneva di per sé evidentemente sublime, dalla demonologia cristiana, che riteneva di per sé evidentemente ridicola. Eppure, se prendiamo un qualsiasi uomo tipico della generazione successiva, con ogni probabilità troveremo derisa la cosa sublime di Huxley, e presa sul serio la cosa ridicola di Huxley. Immagino che un figlio assai tipico dell’età che seguì quella di Huxley possa trovarsi nel signor George Moore. Egli possiede uno dei talenti più critici, apprezzativi e atmosferici dell’epoca. Ha vissuto nella maggior parte degli ambienti dell’epoca, e attraverso la maggior parte delle mode dell’epoca. Ha sostenuto, in un tempo o nell’altro, la maggior parte delle opinioni dell’epoca. Soprattutto, non solo ha pensato per proprio conto, ma lo ha fatto con particolare pompa e orgoglio; egli si considererebbe il più libero di tutti i liberi pensatori. Prendiamolo come tipo e come prova di ciò che è realmente accaduto all’analisi di Huxley sull’oro e sulle scorie. Huxley citava come ideale indistruttibile il nobile passo di Michea, che comincia «Egli ti ha mostrato, o uomo, ciò che è bene»; e chiedeva con scherno se qualcuno fosse mai probabilmente destinato a suggerire che la giustizia fosse senza valore o che la misericordia fosse inamabile, e se qualcosa avrebbe potuto diminuire la distanza tra noi stessi e gli ideali che riveriamo. Eppure già, forse, il signor George Moore anticipava Nietzsche, navigando vicino, come diceva, «agli scogli sommersi attorno alla caverna di Zarathustra». Disse, se ben ricordo, che Cromwell doveva essere ammirato per la sua ingiustizia. Lasciò intendere che Cristo dovesse essere condannato, non perché distrusse i porci, ma perché guarì i malati. In breve trovava la giustizia del tutto priva di valore e la misericordia del tutto inamabile; e quanto all’umiltà e alla distanza tra sé stesso e i suoi ideali, sembrava piuttosto suggerire (a quel tempo almeno) che i suoi ideali alquanto mutevoli fossero interessanti soltanto perché erano appartenuti a lui. Parte di questo, è vero, era soltanto nelle Confessioni di un giovane; ma è proprio questo il punto qui, che esse erano allora le confessioni di un giovane, e che quelle di Huxley in confronto erano le confessioni di un vecchio. La tendenza del nuovo tempo, in gradi assai variabili, tendeva a scalzare non solo la demonologia cristiana, non solo la teologia cristiana, non solo la religione cristiana, ma decisamente l’ideale etico cristiano, che al grande agnostico era parso sicuro come le stelle.
But while the world was mocking the morality he had assumed, it was bringing back the mysticism he had mocked. The next phase of 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 even comic is the reality of the supernatural, saying that he knew a farmer whom the fairies had dragged out of bed and beaten. Now suppose Mr. Yeats had told Mr. Moore, then moving in this glamorous atmosphere, another story of the same sort. Suppose he had said that the farmer’s pigs had fallen under the displeasure of some magician of the sort he celebrates, who had conjured bad fairies into the quadrupeds, so that they went in a wild dance down to the village pond. Would Mr. Moore have thought that story any more incredible than the other? Would he have thought it worse than a thousand other things that a modern mystic may lawfully believe? Would he have risen to his feet and 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 improbable than hundreds of psychic fantasies or farces for which there is really a good deal of evidence. He would be ready to entertain the idea if he found it anywhere except in the New Testament. As for the more vulgar and universal fashions that have followed after the Celtic movement, they have left such trifles far behind. And they have been directed not by imaginative artists like Mr. Yeats or even Mr. Moore, but by solid scientific students like Sir William Crookes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I find it easier to imagine an evil spirit agitating the legs of a pig than a good spirit agitating the legs of a table. But I will not here enter into the argument, since I am only trying to describe the atmosphere. Whatever has happened in more recent years, what Huxley expected has certainly not happened. There has been a revolt against Christian morality, and where there has not been a return of Christian mysticism, it has been a return of the 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 devils worse 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 very last element in the Christian story that would ever have been selected by the enlightened Christian apologist. Gladstone would defend 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 finding an unexpected support, and finding it in an unexpected quarter. It is not theological but psychological study that has brought us back into this dark underworld of the soul, where even identity seems 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 almost as near to a new supernaturalism, and things quite as incredible to the old rationalism. Dual personality is not so very far from diabolic possession. And if the dogma of subconsciousness allows 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 it cannot have an underground passage leading anywhere else in the world. He cannot say he knows nothing whatever about its size or shape or appearance, except that it certainly does not contain a relic of the finger-joint of St. Catherine of Alexandria, or that it certainly is not haunted by the ghost of King Herod Agrippa. If there is any sort of legend or tradition or plausible probability which says that it is, he cannot call a thing impossible where he is not only ignorant but even unconscious. It comes back therefore to the same reality, that the old compact cosmos depended on a compact 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 say that 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 we are in very deep waters, whether or no we have rushed down a steep place to fall into them.
It will be noted that what we really lack here is not the 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 thing diabolic is hardly an argument against the existence of diabolism. It is still more clearly the case when we go outside the sphere of science into its penumbra in literature and conversation. There is a mass of fiction and fashionable talk of which it may truly be said, that what we miss in it is not demons but the power to 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 found the Dragon. We have found in the desert, as I have said, the bones of the monster we did not believe in, more plainly than the footprints of the hero we did. We have found them not because we expected to find them, for our progressive minds look to the promise of something much brighter and even better; not because we wanted to 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 really thought it impossible so far as we ever thought of it at all. We have found them because they are there; and we are bound to come on them even by falling over them. It is Huxley’s method that has upset Huxley’s conclusion. As I have said, that conclusion itself is completely reversed. What he thought indisputable 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 style of Gladstone, but rather by obstinate objective curiosity according to the advice of Huxley. We in the West have “followed our reason as far as it would go,” and our reason has led us to things that nearly 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 our unreason as far as it will go, seeing whether the brain will crack under the conception that space is curved, or that parallel straight lines always meet. And the science of Freud would make it essentially 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 that he knows nothing. That is exactly what he does not know. The floor has fallen out of his mind and the abyss below may contain subconscious certainties as well as subconscious doubts. He is too ignorant even to ignore; and he must confess himself an agnostic about whether he is an agnostic.
Ma mentre il mondo derideva la moralità che egli aveva assunto, riportava indietro il misticismo che egli aveva deriso. La fase successiva dello stesso signor George Moore, che ho preso come tipo del tempo, fu la seria e comprensiva considerazione del misticismo irlandese, incarnato nel signor W. B. Yeats. Io stesso ho udito il signor Yeats, verso quel tempo, narrare una storia, per illustrare quanto concreta e persino comica sia la realtà del soprannaturale, dicendo che conosceva un contadino che le fate avevano trascinato fuori dal letto e picchiato. Ora supponiamo che il signor Yeats avesse raccontato al signor Moore, allora immerso in questa atmosfera affascinante, un’altra storia dello stesso genere. Supponiamo che avesse detto che i porci del contadino erano incorsi nel dispiacere di qualche mago del tipo che egli celebra, il quale aveva evocato fate malvage dentro i quadrupedi, così che essi scesero in una selvaggia danza fino allo stagno del villaggio. Avrebbe il signor Moore ritenuto quella storia più incredibile dell’altra? L’avrebbe ritenuta peggiore di mille altre cose alle quali un mistico moderno può lecitamente credere? Si sarebbe alzato in piedi e avrebbe detto al signor Yeats che tra loro tutto era finito? Niente affatto. Avrebbe almeno ascoltato con volto serio, anzi solenne. L’avrebbe ritenuta un truce piccolo grottesco di diavoleria rustica, un bizzarro racconto di folletti, né più né meno improbabile di centinaia di fantasie o farse psichiche per le quali vi sono davvero non poche prove. Sarebbe stato disposto a dar credito all’idea se l’avesse trovata in qualsiasi luogo tranne che nel Nuovo Testamento. Quanto alle mode più volgari e universali che hanno seguito il movimento celtico, esse hanno lasciato tali inezie assai indietro. E sono state guidate non da artisti immaginativi come il signor Yeats o persino il signor Moore, ma da solidi studiosi scientifici come Sir William Crookes e Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Trovo più facile immaginare uno spirito malvagio che agita le zampe di un porco che uno spirito buono che agita le gambe di un tavolo. Ma non entrerò qui nell’argomento, poiché sto solo cercando di descrivere l’atmosfera. Qualunque cosa sia accaduta negli anni più recenti, ciò che Huxley si aspettava non è certamente accaduto. Vi è stata una rivolta contro la moralità cristiana, e dove non vi è stato un ritorno del misticismo cristiano, vi è stato un ritorno del misticismo senza il Cristianesimo. Il misticismo stesso è tornato, con tutte le sue lune e i suoi crepuscoli, i suoi talismani e i suoi incantesimi. Il misticismo stesso è tornato, e ha portato con sé sette demoni peggiori di lui.
Ma la coincidenza scientifica è ancor più rigorosa e stretta. Essa riguarda non solo la questione generale dei miracoli, ma la questione particolare della possessione. Questo è proprio l’ultimo elemento della storia cristiana che sarebbe mai stato scelto dall’illuminato apologeta cristiano. Gladstone lo avrebbe difeso, ma non si sarebbe scomodato a insistervi. È un eccellente modello operativo di ciò che intendo per trovare un sostegno inatteso, e trovarlo in un quartiere inatteso. Non è lo studio teologico ma quello psicologico che ci ha ricondotti in questo oscuro mondo sotterraneo dell’anima, dove perfino l’identità sembra dissolversi o dividersi, e gli uomini non sono nemmeno sé stessi. Non dico che gli psicologi ammettano la scoperta degli indemoniati; e se lo facessero senza dubbio li chiamerebbero in qualche altro modo, come demono-maniaci. Ma ammettono cose che paiono quasi altrettanto prossime a un nuovo soprannaturalismo, e cose altrettanto incredibili per il vecchio razionalismo. La doppia personalità non è poi così lontana dalla possessione diabolica. E se il dogma della subcoscienza consente l’agnosticismo, l’agnosticismo taglia da entrambe le parti. Un uomo non può dire che vi è una parte di lui della quale è del tutto inconsapevole, ed essere consapevole soltanto che essa non è in contatto con l’ignoto. Non può dire che vi è una camera sigillata o una cantina sotto la sua casa, della quale non sa assolutamente nulla; ma che è del tutto certo che essa non possa avere un passaggio sotterraneo che conduce in qualche altro luogo del mondo. Non può dire di non sapere assolutamente nulla della sua grandezza o forma o aspetto, salvo che essa certamente non contiene una reliquia dell’articolazione del dito di Santa Caterina d’Alessandria, o che certamente non è infestata dal fantasma del re Erode Agrippa. Se vi è una qualche sorta di leggenda o tradizione o plausibile probabilità che dica che lo è, egli non può chiamare impossibile una cosa laddove non è solo ignorante ma persino inconsapevole. Ritorna dunque alla stessa realtà, che il vecchio cosmo compatto dipendeva da una coscienza compatta. Se abbiamo a che fare con quantità sconosciute, non possiamo negare la loro connessione con altre quantità sconosciute. Se ho un Sé del quale non posso dire nulla, come posso persino dire che è il mio proprio Sé? Come posso persino dire di averlo sempre avuto, o che non è venuto da qualche altro luogo? È chiaro che siamo in acque assai profonde, che ci siamo o no precipitati giù per un pendio scosceso per caderci dentro.
Si noterà che ciò che qui ci manca davvero non è il soprannaturale ma soltanto il soprannaturale sano. Non è il miracolo, ma soltanto il miracolo della guarigione. Simpatizzo calorosamente con coloro che ritengono tutto ciò piuttosto morboso, e più prossimo al diabolico che al divino, ma chiamare diabolica una cosa non è certo un argomento contro l’esistenza del diabolismo. È ancor più chiaramente il caso quando usciamo dalla sfera della scienza nella sua penombra nella letteratura e nella conversazione. Vi è una massa di narrativa e di chiacchiere alla moda della quale si può veramente dire che ciò che vi manca non sono i demoni ma il potere di scacciarli. Essa combina l’occulto con l’osceno; la sensualità del materialismo con l’insania dello spiritualismo. Nella storia di Gadara abbiamo tralasciato ogni cosa tranne il Redentore, abbiamo conservato i demoni e i porci.
In altre parole, non abbiamo trovato San Giorgio; ma abbiamo trovato il Drago. Abbiamo trovato nel deserto, come ho detto, le ossa del mostro in cui non credevamo, più chiaramente delle orme dell’eroe in cui credevamo. Le abbiamo trovate non perché ci aspettavamo di trovarle, poiché le nostre menti progressiste guardano alla promessa di qualcosa di assai più luminoso e persino migliore; non perché volevamo trovarle, poiché il nostro stato d’animo moderno, come pure la nostra natura umana, è interamente a favore di cose più amabili e rassicuranti; non perché ritenevamo persino possibile trovarle, poiché in verità lo ritenevamo impossibile, per quanto vi pensassimo affatto. Le abbiamo trovate perché sono là; e siamo destinati a imbatterci in esse anche solo inciampandovi. È il metodo di Huxley che ha capovolto la conclusione di Huxley. Come ho detto, quella conclusione stessa è completamente rovesciata. Ciò che egli riteneva indiscutibile è discusso; e ciò che riteneva impossibile è possibile. Invece della morale cristiana che sopravvive nella forma di morale umanitaria, la demonologia cristiana è sopravvissuta nella forma di demonologia pagana. Ma non è sopravvissuta per erudito tradizionalismo alla maniera di Gladstone, bensì piuttosto per ostinata curiosità oggettiva secondo il consiglio di Huxley. Noi in Occidente abbiamo «seguito la nostra ragione fin dove poteva arrivare», e la nostra ragione ci ha condotti a cose che quasi tutti i razionalisti avrebbero ritenuto follemente irrazionali. Si supponeva che la scienza ci intimorisse fino a farci diventare razionalisti; ma ora si suppone che ci intimorisca fino a farci diventare irrazionalisti. La scienza di Einstein potrebbe piuttosto essere chiamata il seguire la nostra irragione fin dove arriverà, per vedere se il cervello si spezzerà sotto la concezione che lo spazio è curvo, o che le rette parallele si incontrano sempre. E la scienza di Freud renderebbe essenzialmente impossibile dire fin dove arrivi la nostra ragione o irragione, o dove si fermi. Poiché se un uomo è ignorante del suo altro Sé, come può mai sapere che l’altro Sé è ignorante? Non può più dire con orgoglio che almeno sa di non sapere nulla. È esattamente ciò che non sa. Il pavimento è crollato sotto la sua mente e l’abisso sottostante può contenere certezze subconsce come pure dubbi subconsci. È troppo ignorante persino per ignorare; e deve confessarsi agnostico su se egli sia un agnostico.
That is the coil or tangle, at least, which the dragon has reached even in the scientific regions of the West. I only describe the tangle; I do not delight in it. Like most people with a taste for 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 peculiar realms of reason; especially the European realms of the motor and the telephone. When we have a man like Mr. William Archer, lecturing mystically on dreams and psychoanalysis, and saying it is clear that God did not make man a reasonable creature, those acquainted with the traditions and distinguished record of that dry and capable Scot will consider the fact a prodigy. I confess it never occurred to me that Mr. Archer was of such stuff as 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 chanced to stray into those orient hills where those occult streams have always risen, and especially in this land that lies between 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 between two worlds, where the rocks stand out stark like the very bones of the Dragon.
As I went down that sloping wall or shoulder of the world from the Holy City on the mountain to the buried Cities of the Plain, I seemed to see more and more clearly all this Western evolution 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 through the desert, as described in the last chapter, about the gods of Asia and of the ancient dispensation, and I found it led me along these hills to a sort of vista or vision of the new dispensation and 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 what was undoubtedly, when thus considered, one tribe among many tribes worshipping one god among many gods, but it is quite as much an evident external fact that the god has become God. Still stated objectively, the story is that the tribe having this religion produced a new prophet, claiming to be more than a prophet. The old religion killed the new prophet; but the new prophet killed the old religion. He died to destroy it, and it died in destroying him. Now it may be reaffirmed equally realistically that there was nothing normal about the case or its consequences. The things that took part in that tragedy have never been the same since, and have never been like 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 perish like Babylon and Assyria. It went through a most extraordinary remorse amounting to madness and resuscitation into sanity, which is equally strange in history whether it seems as ghastly as 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 we regard them as a reconquest by Christendom or a conspiracy of Jews or a part of the lingering quarrel with Moslems, are alike the effect of forces gathered and loosened in that one mysterious moment in the history of the city. They equally proclaim the paradox of 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 among those 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 modern man saying that Christ is only a thing like Atys or Mithras, when the next moment he is reproaching Christianity for not following Christ? He does not suddenly lose his temper and talk about our most unmithraic conduct, as he does (very justly as a rule) about our most unchristian conduct. We do not find a group of ardent young agnostics, in the middle of a great war, tried as traitors for their extravagant interpretation of remarks attributed to Atys. It is improbable that Tolstoy wrote a book to prove that all modern ills could be cured by literal obedience to all the orders of Adonis. We do not find wild Bolshevists calling themselves Mithraic Socialists as many of them call themselves Christian Socialists. Leaving orthodoxy and even sanity entirely on one side, the very heresies and insanities of our time prove that after nearly two thousand years the issue is 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 Mithras as 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 for those to whom it is little more than a legend, has another relevancy 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 generally took pains to exalt his humanity. Of the nineteenth-century revolutionists it is really an understatement to say that they exalted him as a man; for indeed they rather exalted him as a superman. That is to say, many of them represented him as a man preaching a decisively superior and ever strange morality, not only in advance of his age but practically in advance of our age. They made of his mystical counsels of perfection a sort of Socialism or Pacifism or Communism, which they themselves still see rather as something that ought to be or that will be; the extreme limit of universal love. I am not discussing here whether they are right or not; I say they have in fact found in the same figure a type of humanitarianism and the care for human happiness. Every one knows the striking and sometimes staggering utterances that do really support and illustrate this side of the teaching. Modern idealists are naturally moved by such things as the intensely poetic paradox about the lilies of the field; which for them has a 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 humanistic view of the case would allow of such criticism without incongruity, have not made some study of the purely poetical or oratorical structure of such passages. Certainly there are few finer examples of the swift architecture 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 pavilions and palaces and the great name of the national history; and then with a turn of the hand like a gesture of scorn, the change to the grass that 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 a celestial flight of stairs, a ladder of imaginative logic. Indeed this a fortiori, and this power of thinking on three levels, is (I may remark 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 surface goes beyond a line; for instance, that the citizen is infinitely above all ranks, and yet the soul is infinitely above the citizen. But we are only concerned at the moment with the sides of this many-sided mystery which happen to be really in sympathy with the modern mood. Judged even by our modern tests of emancipated art or ideal economics, it is admitted that Christ understood all that is rather crudely embodied in Socialism or the Simple Life. I purposely insist first on this optimistic, I might almost say this pantheistic or even this pagan aspect of the Christian Gospels. For it is only when we understand that Christ, considered merely as a prophet, can be and is a popular leader in the love of natural things, that we can feel that tremendous and tragic energy of his testimony to an ugly reality, the existence of unnatural things. Instead of taking a text as I have done, take a whole Gospel and read it steadily and honestly and straight through at a sitting, and you will 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 of the flowers of the battle-field; but he came out to battle. And if most of his words mean anything they do mean that there is at our very feet, like a chasm concealed among the flowers, an unfathomable evil.
Questa è la spira o il groviglio, almeno, che il drago ha raggiunto perfino nelle regioni scientifiche dell’Occidente. Io descrivo soltanto il groviglio; non me ne compiaccio. Come la maggior parte delle persone con un gusto per la tradizione cattolica, sono troppo razionalista per questo; poiché i cattolici sono ormai quasi gli unici a difendere la ragione. Ma non sto parlando delle vere relazioni tra ragione e mistero, bensì del fatto storico che il mistero ha invaso i regni peculiari della ragione; specialmente i regni europei dell’automobile e del telefono. Quando abbiamo un uomo come il signor William Archer, che tiene misticamente conferenze sui sogni e sulla psicoanalisi, e afferma che è chiaro che Dio non fece dell’uomo una creatura ragionevole, coloro che conoscono le tradizioni e il distinto curriculum di quello Scozzese arido e capace considereranno il fatto un prodigio. Confesso che non mi era mai venuto in mente che il signor Archer fosse fatto della stessa materia di cui son fatti i sogni; e se sta diventando un mistico nella sua vecchiaia (uso la frase in senso mistico e meramente relativo) possiamo ritenere che la piena occulta orientale stia salendo rapidamente, e raggiungendo luoghi che non sono soltanto alti ma asciutti. Ma il mutamento è assai più evidente a un uomo che ha avuto occasione di smarrirsi in quei colli orientali dove quei flussi occulti sono sempre sorti, e specialmente in questa terra che giace tra l’Asia, dove l’occulto è quasi l’ovvio, e l’Europa, dove esso ritorna sempre con un vigore più fresco e più giovane. La verità diviene stranamente luminosa in questo deserto tra due mondi, dove le rocce si ergono nude come le ossa stesse del Drago.
Mentre scendevo lungo quella parete o spalla inclinata del mondo dalla Santa Città sul monte alle Città sepolte della Pianura, mi pareva di vedere sempre più chiaramente tutta questa evoluzione occidentale del mistero orientale, e come su questo unico luogo elevato, come su un perno, l’intero scopo dell’umanità si fosse deviato. Ripresi di nuovo il filo di pensiero che avevo trascinato attraverso il deserto, come descritto nel capitolo precedente, riguardo agli dèi dell’Asia e dell’antica dispensazione, e trovai che esso mi conduceva lungo questi colli a una sorta di prospettiva o visione della nuova dispensazione e della Cristianità. Considerata oggettivamente, e dall’esterno, la storia è qualcosa quale è già stato vagamente delineato; l’emergere in questa immemorabile e misteriosa terra di ciò che era senza dubbio, quando così considerato, una tribù tra molte tribù che adorava un dio tra molti dèi, ma è altrettanto un evidente fatto esterno che il dio sia divenuto Dio. Sempre affermato oggettivamente, la storia è che la tribù avente questa religione produsse un nuovo profeta, che pretendeva di essere più di un profeta. La vecchia religione uccise il nuovo profeta; ma il nuovo profeta uccise la vecchia religione. Egli morì per distruggerla, ed essa morì nel distruggere lui. Ora si può riaffermare altrettanto realisticamente che non vi fu nulla di normale nel caso o nelle sue conseguenze. Le cose che presero parte a quella tragedia non sono mai state le stesse da allora, e non sono mai state simili a nient’altro al mondo. La Chiesa non è come le altre religioni; i suoi stessi crimini furono unici. Gli Ebrei non sono come le altre razze; restano unici per tutti gli altri quanto lo sono per sé stessi. L’Impero Romano non tramontò come gli altri imperi; non perì come Babilonia e Assiria. Attraversò uno straordinarissimo rimorso che rasentava la follia e una risurrezione nella sanità mentale, che è del pari strana nella storia sia che appaia orribile come un cadavere galvanizzato sia gloriosa come un dio risorto dai morti. La terra e la città stesse non sono come le altre terre e città. La concentrazione e il conflitto in Gerusalemme oggi, sia che li consideriamo come una riconquista da parte della Cristianità o una cospirazione di Ebrei o una parte della perdurante contesa con i musulmani, sono del pari l’effetto di forze raccolte e liberate in quell’unico momento misterioso nella storia della città. Esse proclamano del pari il paradosso della sua insignificanza e della sua importanza.
Ma soprattutto il profeta non era e non è come gli altri profeti; e la prova di ciò si trova non primariamente tra coloro che credono in lui, ma tra coloro che non credono. Egli non è morto, nemmeno là dove è negato. A che serve che un uomo moderno dica che Cristo è solo una cosa come Atys o Mitra, quando l’attimo successivo rimprovera il Cristianesimo di non seguire Cristo? Egli non perde d’un tratto le staffe e parla della nostra condotta assai poco mitraica, come fa (assai giustamente di regola) della nostra condotta assai poco cristiana. Non troviamo un gruppo di ardenti giovani agnostici, nel mezzo di una grande guerra, processati come traditori per la loro interpretazione stravagante di osservazioni attribuite ad Atys. È improbabile che Tolstoj abbia scritto un libro per dimostrare che tutti i mali moderni potrebbero essere guariti dall’obbedienza letterale a tutti gli ordini di Adone. Non troviamo selvaggi bolscevichi che si autodefiniscono socialisti mitraici come molti di loro si autodefiniscono socialisti cristiani. Lasciando interamente da parte l’ortodossia e persino la sanità mentale, le stesse eresie e insanie del nostro tempo provano che dopo quasi duemila anni la questione è ancora viva e il nome è assai letteralmente uno con cui evocare. Provino i critici a evocare con uno qualsiasi degli altri nomi. Nei veri centri della moderna indagine e attività mentale, essi non smuoveranno nemmeno un mistico con il nome di Mitra come smuoveranno un materialista con il nome di Gesù. Vi sono uomini che negano Dio e accettano Cristo.
Ma questo potere ancora persistente eppure vivo nella leggenda, anche per coloro ai quali essa è poco più di una leggenda, ha un’altra pertinenza al punto particolare che qui ci occupa. Gesù di Nazaret, meramente considerato in senso umano, è così divenuto un eroe dell’umanitarismo. Persino i deisti del diciottesimo secolo, nel negare la sua divinità, si affannavano generalmente a esaltare la sua umanità. Dei rivoluzionari del diciannovesimo secolo è davvero un eufemismo dire che lo esaltarono come uomo; poiché in verità lo esaltarono piuttosto come superuomo. Vale a dire, molti di loro lo rappresentarono come un uomo che predicava una moralità decisamente superiore e sempre strana, non solo in anticipo sulla sua epoca ma praticamente in anticipo sulla nostra epoca. Fecero dei suoi mistici consigli di perfezione una sorta di socialismo o pacifismo o comunismo, che essi stessi vedono ancora piuttosto come qualcosa che dovrebbe essere o che sarà; il limite estremo dell’universale amore. Non sto discutendo qui se abbiano ragione o no; dico che essi hanno di fatto trovato nella medesima figura un tipo di umanitarismo e la cura per la felicità umana. Chiunque conosce le sorprendenti e talvolta sbalorditive affermazioni che davvero sostengono e illustrano questo lato dell’insegnamento. Gli idealisti moderni sono naturalmente commossi da cose come l’intensamente poetico paradosso sui gigli del campo; il quale per loro ha una gioia nella vita e nelle cose viventi come quella di Shelley o di Whitman, unita a un ritorno alla semplicità al di là di quella di Tolstoj o di Thoreau. Anzi mi meraviglio piuttosto che coloro, il cui punto di vista meramente storico o umanistico del caso consentirebbe una tale critica senza incongruità, non abbiano fatto qualche studio della struttura puramente poetica o oratoria di tali passi. Certamente vi sono pochi esempi più raffinati della rapida architettura dello stile di quel singolo frammento sui fiori; l’apertura quasi oziosa di un accenno casuale a un fiore selvatico, l’improvviso dispiegarsi del piccolo fiore purpureo in padiglioni e palazzi e il grande nome della storia nazionale; e poi, con un movimento della mano come un gesto di scherno, il passaggio all’erba che oggi è e domani è gettata nel forno. Segue poi, come tanto spesso nei Vangeli, il «quanto più» che è come una celeste scala di gradini, una scala di logica immaginativa. In verità questo a fortiori, e questo potere di pensare su tre livelli, è (posso osservare per inciso) una cosa di cui vi è grande bisogno nella discussione moderna. Molte menti apparentemente non riescono a estendersi a tre dimensioni, o a pensare che un cubo possa andare oltre una superficie come una superficie va oltre una linea; per esempio, che il cittadino è infinitamente al di sopra di tutti i ranghi, eppure l’anima è infinitamente al di sopra del cittadino. Ma per il momento ci interessano soltanto i lati di questo mistero dalle molte facce che si trovano a essere davvero in sintonia con lo stato d’animo moderno. Giudicato persino secondo i nostri moderni criteri dell’arte emancipata o dell’economia ideale, si ammette che Cristo comprese tutto ciò che è piuttosto rozzamente incarnato nel socialismo o nella Vita Semplice. Insisto deliberatamente dapprima su questo aspetto ottimistico, direi quasi panteistico o persino pagano dei Vangeli cristiani. Poiché è solo quando comprendiamo che Cristo, considerato meramente come profeta, può essere ed è un capopopolo nell’amore delle cose naturali, che possiamo sentire quella tremenda e tragica energia della sua testimonianza a una brutta realtà, l’esistenza delle cose innaturali. Invece di prendere un testo come ho fatto, prendete un intero Vangelo e leggetelo con costanza e onestà e di seguito d’un fiato, e ne avrete certamente un’impressione, sia di un mito sia di un uomo. È che l’esorcista torreggia sopra il poeta e persino sopra il profeta; che la storia tra Cana e il Calvario è una lunga guerra con i demoni. Egli comprese meglio di cento poeti la bellezza dei fiori del campo di battaglia; ma uscì a combattere. E se la maggior parte delle sue parole significa qualcosa, significa davvero che vi è ai nostri stessi piedi, come un abisso celato tra i fiori, un male insondabile.
In short, I would here only hint delicately that perhaps the mind which admittedly knew much of what we think we know about ethics and economics, knew a little more than we are beginning to know about psychology and psychic phenomena. I remember reading, not without amusement, a severe and trenchant article in the Hibbert Journal, in which Christ’s admission of demonology was alone thought enough to dispose of his divinity. The one sentence of the article, which I cherish in my memory through 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 line of 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 Omniscience on the problem of evil might be allowed, even by an agnostic, to be a little difficult to discover. Of Christ in the Gospels and in modern life I will merely for the moment say this; that if he was God, as the critic put it, it seems possible that he knew the 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 nobody can imagine; and we can only say that if it reveals demons and their name is Legion, we can hardly be much surprised now. But at any rate the 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 asked by 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 scenery through which I went as I thought about these things; a sense of silent catastrophe and fundamental cleavage in the deep division of the cliffs and crags. They were all the more profoundly moving, because my sense of them was almost as subconscious 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 landscape that might well awaken anybody. It might awaken a man sleeping; but he would think he was still in a nightmare. It might wake the dead, but they would probably think they were in hell. Halfway down the slope the hills had taken on a certain pallor which had about 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 which contrasted with wild sky-line. Perhaps we are accustomed to the contrary condition of the clouds moving and mutable and the hills solid and serene; but anyhow there seemed something of the making of a new world about the quiet of the skies and the cold convulsion of the landscape. But if it was between chaos and creation, it was creation by God or 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 mind woke up from its meditations. One can only say that the whole landscape was 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 waves or 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 remembered its name, or the ancient tradition about its nature. Then even the green plague-spots failed, and everything seemed to 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 sea below the seas on which men sail. Seas move like clouds and fishes float like birds above the level of the sunken land. And it is here that tradition has laid the tragedy of the mighty perversion of the imagination of man; the monstrous birth and death of abominable things. I say such things in no mood of spiritual pride; such things are hideous not because they are distant but because they 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 darkness of the brain of man, I know not why He came. Certainly it was 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 tale resolves itself into war with the Dragon who is wasting fairyland. I will not enter on the theology behind the symbol; but I am 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 said to 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 the Gospel 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 four corners of the earth, and turned again to acclaim their master, he did not say in that hour of triumph, “All are aspects of one harmonious whole” or “The universe evolves through progress to 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 rock and cleft something of the swiftness of such a thunderbolt. What I saw seemed not so much a scene as an act; as when abruptly Michael barred the passage of the Lord of Pride. Below me all the empire of evil was splashed and scattered upon the plain, like a wine-cup shattered into a star. Sodom lay like Satan, flat upon the floor of the world. And far away and 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.
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In breve, vorrei qui soltanto accennare con delicatezza che forse la mente che, per ammissione di tutti, sapeva molto di ciò che pensiamo di sapere sull’etica e sull’economia, sapeva un po’ di più di quanto noi cominciamo a sapere sulla psicologia e sui fenomeni psichici. Ricordo di aver letto, non senza divertimento, un articolo severo e tagliente sull’Hibbert Journal, in cui l’ammissione della demonologia da parte di Cristo era da sola ritenuta sufficiente a liquidare la sua divinità. L’unica frase dell’articolo, che custodisco nella mia memoria attraverso tutti gli anni mutevoli, suonava così: «Se egli era Dio, sapeva che non esisteva cosa alcuna come la possessione diabolica». Non parve colpire il critico dell’Hibbert che questa linea di critica sollevi la questione, non se Cristo sia Dio, ma se il critico dell’Hibbert Journal sia Dio. Riguardo a quel mistero come riguardo all’altro sono per il momento agnostico; ma avrei pensato che le meditazioni dell’Onniscienza sul problema del male potessero essere ammesse, persino da un agnostico, come un po’ difficili da scoprire. Di Cristo nei Vangeli e nella vita moderna dirò per il momento soltanto questo: che se egli era Dio, come il critico affermava, sembra possibile che conoscesse la prossima scoperta nella scienza, come pure l’ultima, per non dire (cosa più comune nella cultura razionalistica) la terzultima. E quale sarà la prossima scoperta nella scienza psicologica nessuno può immaginarlo; e possiamo solo dire che se essa rivela demoni e il loro nome è Legione, difficilmente potremo ormai stupircene molto. Ma in ogni caso i giorni sono finiti dell’Onniscienza come quella del critico dell’Hibbert, che sa esattamente cosa saprebbe se fosse Dio Onnipotente. Che cos’è il dolore? Che cos’è il male? Cosa intendevano per demoni? Cosa intendiamo per follia? La generazione nascente, interrogata da un venerabile critico e catechista vittoriano, «Che cosa sa Dio?», difficilmente riterrà irragionevolmente frivolo rispondere: «Dio solo lo sa».
Vi era qualcosa già suggerito riguardo al ripido scenario attraverso il quale procedevo mentre pensavo a queste cose; un senso di silenziosa catastrofe e di fondamentale spaccatura nella profonda divisione delle rupi e dei dirupi. Erano tanto più profondamente commoventi, perché il mio senso di essi era quasi altrettanto subconscio quanto la subcoscienza sulla quale riflettevo. Ero ricaduto nella vecchia abitudine di dimenticare dove stavo andando, e di vedere le cose con un occhio distolto, in una cieca astrazione. Mi destai da una sorta di trance di distrazione in un paesaggio che bene poteva destare chiunque. Poteva destare un uomo addormentato; ma egli avrebbe creduto di essere ancora in un incubo. Poteva destare i morti, ma essi avrebbero probabilmente creduto di essere all’inferno. A metà del declivio i colli avevano assunto un certo pallore che aveva in sé qualcosa di primitivo, come se i colori non fossero ancora stati creati. Vi era soltanto una sorta di azzurro freddo e smorto nei cieli piani che contrastava con il selvaggio profilo dell’orizzonte. Forse siamo abituati alla condizione contraria, delle nubi mobili e mutevoli e dei colli solidi e sereni; ma comunque sembrava esservi qualcosa della formazione di un nuovo mondo nella quiete dei cieli e nella fredda convulsione del paesaggio. Ma se era tra il caos e la creazione, era creazione da parte di Dio o almeno da parte degli dèi, qualcosa con uno scopo nella sua anarchia. Fu assai diverso nella fase finale della discesa, dove la mia mente si destò dalle sue meditazioni. Si può solo dire che l’intero paesaggio era come un lebbroso. Era di un bianco e argento e grigio consunti, con meri puntini di vegetazione decadente come le macchie verdi di una pestilenza. Nella forma esso non solo si levava in corni e creste come onde o nubi, ma credo che effettivamente muti come onde o nubi, visibilmente ma con una ripugnante lentezza. La palude è viva. E trovai di nuovo un certo vantaggio nella dimenticanza; poiché vidi tutta questa incredibile contrada prima ancora di ricordarne il nome, o l’antica tradizione riguardo alla sua natura. Poi persino le verdi macchie di peste vennero meno, e ogni cosa sembrò dileguarsi in un vuoto universale sotto il sole fisso, mentre giungevo, nei grandi spazi del cerchio di un mare senza vita, nel silenzio di Sodoma e Gomorra.
Poiché queste sono le fondamenta di un mondo caduto, e un mare al di sotto dei mari sui quali gli uomini navigano. I mari si muovono come nubi e i pesci fluttuano come uccelli al di sopra del livello della terra sommersa. Ed è qui che la tradizione ha collocato la tragedia della possente perversione dell’immaginazione dell’uomo; la mostruosa nascita e morte di cose abominevoli. Dico tali cose senza alcun animo di orgoglio spirituale; tali cose sono orrende non perché sono lontane ma perché sono vicine a noi; in tutti i nostri cervelli, certamente nel mio, erano sepolte cose malvage quanto qualsiasi cosa sepolta sotto quel mare amaro, e se Egli non venne a dar battaglia contro di esse, persino nelle tenebre del cervello dell’uomo, non so perché venne. Certamente non fu soltanto per parlare di fiori o per parlare di socialismo. Più veracemente riusciamo a vedere la vita come una fiaba, più chiaramente il racconto si risolve in guerra con il Drago che sta devastando il paese delle fate. Non entrerò nella teologia dietro il simbolo; ma sono certo che era di questo che tutti i simboli erano simbolici. Ricordo uomini illustri tra i teologi liberali, che trovavano più difficile credere in un solo diavolo che in molti. Ammettevano nel Nuovo Testamento una testimonianza a spiriti malvagi, ma non a un nemico generale del genere umano. Come si dice che alcuni vogliano il dramma dell’Amleto senza il Principe di Danimarca, così essi vorrebbero il dramma dell’Inferno senza il Principe delle Tenebre. Non dico nulla di queste cose, salvo che il linguaggio del Vangelo mi sembra procedere assai più univocamente verso un’unica questione. La voce che vi si ode ha un’autorità quale parla a un esercito; e la sua nota più alta è la vittoria piuttosto che la pace. Quando gli apostoli furono dapprima inviati con i loro volti verso i quattro angoli della terra, e si voltarono di nuovo ad acclamare il loro maestro, egli non disse in quell’ora di trionfo: «Tutto è aspetto di un unico insieme armonioso» o «L’universo si evolve attraverso il progresso verso la perfezione» o «Tutte le cose trovano la loro fine nel Nirvana» o «La goccia di rugiada scivola nel mare splendente». Egli levò lo sguardo e disse: «Vidi Satana cadere come folgore dal cielo».
Allora levai lo sguardo e vidi nelle lunghe linee frastagliate di strada e roccia e fenditura qualcosa della rapidità di un simile fulmine. Ciò che vidi mi parve non tanto una scena quanto un atto; come quando bruscamente Michele sbarrò il passaggio al Signore dell’Orgoglio. Sotto di me tutto l’impero del male era schizzato e sparso sulla pianura, come una coppa di vino frantumata in una stella. Sodoma giaceva come Satana, distesa sul pavimento del mondo. E lontano e in alto, fioca per altezza e distanza, piccola ma ancora visibile, si ergeva la guglia dell’Ascensione come la spada dell’Arcangelo, levata in saluto dopo un colpo.
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CHAPTER X
THE ENDLESS EMPIRE
One of the adventures of travel consists, not so much in finding that popular sayings are false, as that they mean more than they say. We cannot appreciate the full force of the phrase until we have seen the fact. We make a picture of the things we do not know out of the things we know; and suppose the traveller’s tale to mean no more abroad than it would at home. If a man acquainted only with English churches is told about certain French churches that they are much frequented, he makes an English picture. He imagines a definite dense crowd of people in their best clothes going all together at eleven o’clock, and all coming back together to lunch. He does not picture the peculiar impression he would gain on the spot; of chance people going in and out of the church all day, sometimes for quite short periods, as if it were a sort of sacred inn. Or suppose a man knowing only English beer-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 top of 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 Germany that I am glad to be able to pay a passing tribute to those more generous German traditions which we hope may revive and make Germany once more a part of Christendom. I merely give it as an instance of the way in which things we have all heard of, like church-going or beer-drinking, in foreign lands, mean much more, and something much more special, than we should infer from our own land. Now this is true of a phrase we have all heard of deserted cities or temples in the Near East: “The Bedouins camp in the ruins.” When I have read a hundred times that Arabs camp in some deserted town or temple near the Nile or the Euphrates, I always thought of gipsies near some place like Stonehenge. They would make their own rude shelter near the stones, perhaps sheltering behind them to light a fire; and for the rest, generations of gipsies might camp there without making much difference. The thing I saw more than once in Egypt and Palestine was much more curious. It was as if the gipsies set to work to refurnish Stonehenge and make it a commodious residence. It was as if they spread a sort of giant umbrella over the circle of stones, and elaborately hung curtains between them, so as to turn the old Druid temple into a sort of patchwork pavilion. In one sense there is much more vandalism, and in another sense much more practicality; but it is a practicality that always stops short of the true creative independence of going off and building a house of their own. That is the attitude of the Arab; and it runs through all his history. Noble as is his masterpiece of the Mosque of 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 fictions or even shams.
I frequently saw old ruined houses of which there only remained two walls of stone, to which the nomads had added two walls of canvas making an exact cube in form with the most startling incongruity in colour. He needs the form and he does not mind the incongruity, nor does he mind the fact that somebody else has done the solid part and he has only done the ramshackle part. You can say that he is nobly superior to jealousy, or that he is without artistic ambition, or that he is too much of a nomad to mind living half in somebody else’s house and half in his own. The real quality is probably too subtle for any simple praise or blame; we can only say that there is 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 Arab conquests and Arab culture in all its ingenuity and insufficiency. That is the note of these nomads in all the things in which they have succeeded and failed. In that sense they are constructive and in that sense unconstructive; in that sense artistic and in that sense inartistic; in that sense practical and in that sense unpractical; in that sense cunning and in that sense innocent. The curtains they would hang round Stonehenge might be of beautifully selected colours. The banners they waved from Stonehenge might be defended with glorious courage and enthusiasm. The prayers they recited in Stonehenge might be essentially worthy of human dignity, and certainly a great improvement on its older associations of human sacrifice. All this is 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 Salisbury or 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 a subtle manner superficial. When a man first sees the Eastern deserts, he sees this influence as I first described it, very present and powerful, almost omnipresent and omnipotent. But I fancy that to me and to others it is partly striking only because it is strange. Islam is so different to Christendom that to see it at all is at first like entering a new world. But, in my own case at any rate, as the strange colours became more customary, and especially as I saw more of the established seats of history, the cities and the framework of 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 yet very 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 houses of gold full of hard highly coloured pictures, I fancied it came to me. It was the Empire. And certainly not the raid of Asiatic bandits we call the Turkish Empire. The thing which had caught my eye in that coloured interior was the carving of a two-headed eagle in 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 well suggest, the suggestion that the Russian Church was far too much of an Established 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 Rome and of Byzantium; the one head looking to the west and the other to the east, as if it spread its wings from the sunrise to the sunset. Unless I am mistaken, it was only associated with Russia as late as Peter the Great, though it had been the badge of Austria as the representative of the Holy Roman Empire. And what I felt brooding over that shrine and that landscape was something older not only than Turkey or Russia but than Austria itself. I began to understand a sort of evening light that lies over Palestine and Syria; a sense of smooth ruts of custom such as are said to give a dignity to the civilisation of China. I even understood a sort of sleepiness about the splendid and handsome Orthodox priests moving fully robed about the streets. They were not aristocrats but officials; still moving with the mighty routine of some far-off official system. In so far as the eagle was an 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.
CAPITOLO X
L’IMPERO SENZA FINE
Una delle avventure del viaggiare consiste non tanto nello scoprire che i detti popolari sono falsi, quanto che essi significano più di ciò che dicono. Non possiamo apprezzare la piena forza della frase finché non abbiamo visto il fatto. Ci facciamo un’immagine delle cose che non conosciamo a partire dalle cose che conosciamo; e supponiamo che il racconto del viaggiatore non significhi all’estero più di quanto significherebbe in patria. Se a un uomo che conosce solo le chiese inglesi si dice di certe chiese francesi che sono assai frequentate, egli si fa un’immagine inglese. Immagina una precisa folla fitta di gente nei suoi abiti migliori che va tutta insieme alle undici in punto, e che ritorna tutta insieme a pranzo. Non immagina la peculiare impressione che ne ricaverebbe sul posto: di gente casuale che entra ed esce dalla chiesa tutto il giorno, talvolta per periodi assai brevi, come se fosse una sorta di sacra locanda. Oppure, se un uomo che conosce solo le birrerie inglesi sente parlare per la prima volta di un giardino della birra tedesco, probabilmente non immagina il lento rituale del luogo. Non sa che, a meno che il bevitore non sbatta positivamente il coperchio del suo boccale di birra con un rumore risonante e un gesto deciso, la birra continuerà a scorrervi come da una fonte naturale; essendo il bere birra considerato lo stato normale dell’uomo, e la sua cessazione una partenza decisa e persino drammatica. Non porto questo esempio con disprezzo; Dio non voglia. Ho avuto tanto da dire sul lato disumano della Germania prussianizzata che sono lieto di poter rendere un tributo di passaggio a quelle più generose tradizioni tedesche che speriamo possano rinascere e rendere la Germania ancora una volta parte della Cristianità. Lo porto meramente come esempio del modo in cui cose di cui tutti abbiamo sentito parlare, come l’andare in chiesa o il bere birra, in terre straniere, significano assai di più, e qualcosa di assai più speciale, di quanto dedurremmo dalla nostra propria terra. Ora questo è vero di una frase di cui tutti abbiamo sentito parlare a proposito di città o templi abbandonati nel Vicino Oriente: «I beduini si accampano tra le rovine». Quando ho letto un centinaio di volte che gli Arabi si accampano in qualche città o tempio abbandonato presso il Nilo o l’Eufrate, ho sempre pensato agli zingari presso qualche luogo come Stonehenge. Si costruirebbero il loro rozzo riparo presso le pietre, magari riparandosi dietro di esse per accendere un fuoco; e per il resto, generazioni di zingari potrebbero accamparvisi senza fare gran differenza. La cosa che vidi più di una volta in Egitto e in Palestina fu assai più curiosa. Era come se gli zingari si mettessero all’opera per riarredare Stonehenge e farne una comoda residenza. Era come se stendessero una sorta di ombrello gigante sul cerchio di pietre, e appendessero elaboratamente tende tra di esse, così da trasformare il vecchio tempio druidico in una sorta di padiglione a toppe. In un senso vi è assai più vandalismo, e in un altro senso assai più praticità; ma è una praticità che si arresta sempre prima della vera indipendenza creativa di andarsene e costruirsi una casa propria. Questo è l’atteggiamento dell’Arabo; e percorre tutta la sua storia. Per quanto nobile sia il suo capolavoro della Moschea di Omar, vi è in essa qualcosa di quel padiglione a toppe. Fu basata su opera cristiana, fu costruita con frammenti, si accontentò di cose che gli architetti schizzinosi chiamano finzioni o persino imposture.
Vidi di frequente vecchie case in rovina delle quali restavano soltanto due muri di pietra, ai quali i nomadi avevano aggiunto due muri di tela formando un cubo esatto nella forma con la più sorprendente incongruità nel colore. Egli ha bisogno della forma e non gli importa dell’incongruità, né gli importa il fatto che qualcun altro abbia fatto la parte solida e lui abbia fatto solo la parte sgangherata. Si può dire che egli è nobilmente superiore all’invidia, o che è privo di ambizione artistica, o che è troppo nomade per curarsi di vivere metà nella casa di qualcun altro e metà nella propria. La vera qualità è probabilmente troppo sottile per qualsiasi semplice lode o biasimo; possiamo solo dire che vi è nel musulmano errante una curiosa sorta di buon senso limitato; che potrebbe persino essere chiamato un buon senso miope. Ma comunque lo definiamo, è quello che si può davvero rintracciare attraverso le conquiste arabe e la cultura araba in tutta la sua ingegnosità e insufficienza. È la nota di questi nomadi in tutte le cose in cui hanno avuto successo e hanno fallito. In quel senso sono costruttivi e in quel senso non costruttivi; in quel senso artistici e in quel senso inartistici; in quel senso pratici e in quel senso impratici; in quel senso astuti e in quel senso innocenti. Le tende che appenderebbero attorno a Stonehenge potrebbero essere di colori splendidamente scelti. Gli stendardi che sventolerebbero da Stonehenge potrebbero essere difesi con glorioso coraggio ed entusiasmo. Le preghiere che reciterebbero a Stonehenge potrebbero essere essenzialmente degne della dignità umana, e certamente un grande miglioramento rispetto alle sue più antiche associazioni di sacrificio umano. Tutto ciò è vero dell’Islam e le idolatrie e le negazioni sono spesso sostituite. Ma essi non avrebbero costruito Stonehenge; a stento, per così dire, si sarebbero disturbati a sollevare una pietra di Stonehenge. Non avrebbero costruito Stonehenge; quanto meno Salisbury o Glastonbury o Lincoln.
Questo è l’elemento riguardo all’influenza araba che la rende, dopo le sue età di supremazia e in un certo senso di successo, sottilmente superficiale. Quando un uomo vede per la prima volta i deserti orientali, vede questa influenza come io l’ho dapprima descritta, assai presente e potente, quasi onnipresente e onnipotente. Ma immagino che a me e ad altri essa colpisca in parte solo perché è strana. L’Islam è così diverso dalla Cristianità che vederlo soltanto è dapprima come entrare in un mondo nuovo. Ma, nel mio caso almeno, man mano che gli strani colori divenivano più consueti, e specialmente man mano che vedevo di più delle sedi consolidate della storia, le città e la struttura dei diversi stati, divenni consapevole di qualcos’altro. Era qualcosa che stava al di sotto, indistrutto e in un certo senso persino immutato. Era qualcosa né musulmano né moderno; non meramente orientale eppure assai diverso dalle nuove nazioni occidentali da cui provenivo. Per lungo tempo non riuscii a dare un nome a questa atmosfera storica. Poi un giorno, in piedi in una delle chiese greche, una di quelle case d’oro piene di immagini dure e dai colori accesi, mi parve che mi venisse in mente. Era l’Impero. E certamente non l’incursione di banditi asiatici che chiamiamo Impero Turco. La cosa che aveva colto il mio sguardo in quell’interno variopinto era l’intaglio di un’aquila a due teste in una posizione tale da renderla quasi altrettanto simbolica di una croce. Chiunque ha udito, naturalmente, della situazione che ciò potrebbe bene suggerire, il suggerimento che la Chiesa Russa fosse fin troppo una Chiesa di Stato e che il Bianco Zar usurpasse il Bianco Cristo. Ma di fatto l’aquila che vidi non era presa in prestito dall’Impero Russo; sarebbe più esatto dire che l’Impero fu preso in prestito dall’aquila. La doppia aquila è l’antico emblema del doppio impero di Roma e di Bisanzio; l’una testa rivolta a occidente e l’altra a oriente, come se spiegasse le ali dal sorgere del sole al suo tramonto. Se non erro, essa fu associata alla Russia solo così tardi come Pietro il Grande, benché fosse stata l’emblema dell’Austria come rappresentante del Sacro Romano Impero. E ciò che sentivo aleggiare su quel santuario e su quel paesaggio era qualcosa di più antico non solo della Turchia o della Russia ma dell’Austria stessa. Cominciai a comprendere una sorta di luce serale che grava sulla Palestina e sulla Siria; un senso di lisci solchi di consuetudine quali si dice diano una dignità alla civiltà della Cina. Compresi persino una sorta di sonnolenza nei splendidi e avvenenti sacerdoti ortodossi che si muovevano interamente paludati per le strade. Non erano aristocratici ma funzionari; che si muovevano ancora con la possente routine di qualche lontano sistema ufficiale. In quanto l’aquila era un emblema non di tale pace imperiale ma di lontane guerre imperiali, era di guerre di cui noi in Occidente abbiamo a stento sentito parlare; era l’emblema di ovazioni ufficiali.
When Heracleius rode homewards from the rout of Ispahan With the captives dragged behind him and the eagles in the van.
That is the rigid reality that still underlay the light mastery of 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 walls of stone. This also was far too great a thing for facile praise or 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 not always 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 indeed nobody would remember Byzantium if it were not for Rome. The more I saw of a hundred little things the more my mind revolved round 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 only called the Latin Patriarch, as if he came from any little town in Latium. The truth behind this confusion is the truth about five hundred very vital years, which are concealed even from cultivated Englishmen by two vague falsehoods; the notion that the Roman Empire was merely decadent 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 title of decay from that Christian city, for surely it was yet more stiff and sterile when it had become a Moslem city. I am not so exacting as to ask any one to popularise such a word as “Constantinopolitan.” But it would surely be a better word for stiffness and sterility to call it Stamboulish. But for the Moslems and other men of the Near East what counted about Byzantium was that 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 be speaking as a Greek, he was ruling as a Roman. Its critics in these 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 bishops degenerate dreamers or dingy outcasts, he called them, with a sounder historical instinct, “The monks of the imperial race.” The survival of the word merely means that even when the imperial city fell behind them, they did not surrender their claim to defy all Asia in the name of the Christian Emperor. That is but one example out of twenty, but that is why in this distant place to this day the Greeks who are separated from the see of 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 pictures or gardens or roads or universities were made by the Teutonic race 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 neighbourhood of Potsdam, or did ten Hansa towns compete to be the birthplace of Homer? Perhaps they do by this time; but their local illusion is no longer largely shared. Anyhow it seems strange that the roads of the Romans should be due to the inspiration of the Teutons; and that parliaments should begin in Spain because they came from Germany. If I looked about in these parts for a local emblem like that of the eagle, I might very well find it in the lion. The lion is common enough, of course, in Christian art both hagiological and heraldic. Besides the cavern of Bethlehem of which I shall speak presently, is the cavern of St. Jerome, where he lived with that real or legendary lion who was drawn by the delicate humour of Carpaccio and a hundred other religious painters. That it should appear in Christian art is natural; that it should appear in Moslem art is much more singular, seeing that Moslems are in theory forbidden so to carve images of living things. Some say the Persian Moslems are less particular; but whatever the explanation, two lions of highly heraldic appearance are carved over that Saracen gate which Christians call the gate of St. Stephen; and the best judges seem to agree that, like so much of the Saracenic shell of Zion, they were partly at least copied from the shields and crests of the Crusaders.
And the lions graven over the gate of St. Stephen might well be the 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 had itself been drawn. The two lions are pacing, passant as the heralds would 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 of the conventional fancy of Moslem decoration, it was only because the Romans had previously brought the lion northward to the cold seas and the savage forests. The image of the lion came from north to south, only because the idea of the lion had long ago come from south to north. The Christian had a symbolic lion he had never seen, and the Moslem had a real lion that he refused to draw. For we could deduce from the case of this single creature the 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 Norman or Angevin shield now quartered in the Royal Arms of England. They may have been copied, directly or indirectly, from that great Angevin King of England whose title credited him with the heart of a lion. They may have in some far-off fashion the same ancestry as the boast or 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 more than of a tiger? Why do your patriotic cartoons threaten the world with the wrath of the British Lion; it is really as strange as if they warned 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 Scandinavian piracy, 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?
Quando Eraclio cavalcava verso casa dalla disfatta di Ispahan Con i prigionieri trascinati dietro di lui e le aquile in avanguardia.
Questa è la rigida realtà che ancora sottostava alla lieve padronanza del cavaliere arabo; questo è ciò che un uomo vede, nel padiglione a toppe, quando si abitua alla tela variopinta e guarda i muri di pietra. Anche questo era una cosa troppo grande per la facile lode o il facile biasimo, una vasta burocrazia affaccendata eppure intensamente dignitosa, la cosa più civile che governasse molte altre civiltà. Era una fine senza fine del mondo; che ripeteva per sempre la sua ricca finalità. E io stesso camminavo ancora in quella lunga sera della terra; e Cesare mio signore era a Bisanzio.
Ma è necessario ricordare in seguito che questo impero non fu sempre alla sua sera. Bisanzio non fu sempre bizantina. Né la sede di quel potere fu sempre nella città di Costantino, che fu primariamente un mero avamposto della città di Cesare. Dobbiamo ricordare Roma come pure Bisanzio; come in verità nessuno ricorderebbe Bisanzio se non fosse per Roma. Più vedevo di cento piccole cose più la mia mente ruotava attorno a quell’idea originaria che si può chiamare il Mediterraneo; e al fatto che esso divenne due imperi, ma rimase una sola civiltà, proprio come è divenuto due chiese, ma è rimasto una sola religione.
In questo piccolo mondo vi è una storia legata a ogni parola; e mai più che quando è la parola sbagliata. Per esempio, possiamo dire che in certi casi la parola Romano significa in realtà Greco. Il Patriarca Greco è talvolta chiamato il Patriarca Romano; mentre il vero Patriarca Romano, che effettivamente proviene da Roma, è chiamato soltanto il Patriarca Latino, come se venisse da una qualsiasi cittadina del Lazio. La verità dietro questa confusione è la verità su cinquecento anni assai vitali, che sono celati persino agli Inglesi colti da due vaghe falsità; l’idea che l’Impero Romano fosse meramente decadente e l’idea che il Medioevo fosse meramente oscuro. Di fatto, persino i Secoli Bui non furono meramente bui. E persino l’Impero Bizantino non fu meramente bizantino. Sembra un poco ingiusto che dobbiamo trarre il titolo stesso di decadenza da quella città cristiana, poiché essa fu certamente ancor più rigida e sterile quando divenne una città musulmana. Non sono così esigente da chiedere ad alcuno di rendere popolare una parola come «costantinopolitano». Ma sarebbe certamente una parola migliore per la rigidità e la sterilità chiamarla stambuliota. Ma per i musulmani e gli altri uomini del Vicino Oriente ciò che contava di Bisanzio era che essa ereditava ancora l’enorme peso del nome di Roma. Roma era venuta a oriente e aveva eretto contro di loro questa città romana, e benché il sacerdote o il soldato che ne usciva potesse parlare come Greco, egli governava come Romano. I suoi critici in questi giorni di critica possono considerarla una civiltà corrotta. Ma i suoi nemici nel giorno della battaglia la consideravano soltanto civiltà. Il Saladino, il più grande dei Saraceni, non chiamava i vescovi greci sognatori degeneri o luridi reietti, li chiamava, con un più sano istinto storico, «I monaci della razza imperiale». La sopravvivenza della parola significa meramente che, anche quando la città imperiale rimase alle loro spalle, essi non rinunciarono alla loro pretesa di sfidare tutta l’Asia nel nome dell’Imperatore cristiano. Questo è solo un esempio su venti, ma è per questo che in questo luogo remoto ancora oggi i Greci che sono separati dalla sede di Roma portano talvolta lo strano nome di «I Romani».
Ora quella civiltà è la nostra civiltà, e non ne abbiamo mai avuto un’altra. Non abbiamo ereditato una cultura teutonica più di quanto una cultura druidica; neppure la metà. Coloro che dicono che i parlamenti o i quadri o i giardini o le strade o le università furono creati dalla razza teutonica del nord possono essere liquidati con la semplice domanda: perché la razza teutonica non li creò nel nord? Perché il Partenone non fu originariamente costruito nei pressi di Potsdam, o dieci città anseatiche gareggiarono per essere il luogo natale di Omero? Forse lo fanno per questo tempo; ma la loro illusione locale non è più largamente condivisa. Comunque sembra strano che le strade dei Romani debbano essere dovute all’ispirazione dei Teutoni; e che i parlamenti debbano cominciare in Spagna perché venivano dalla Germania. Se mi guardassi attorno in queste parti in cerca di un emblema locale come quello dell’aquila, potrei assai bene trovarlo nel leone. Il leone è abbastanza comune, naturalmente, nell’arte cristiana tanto agiografica quanto araldica. Oltre alla caverna di Betlemme di cui parlerò tra breve, vi è la caverna di San Girolamo, dove egli visse con quel leone reale o leggendario che fu ritratto dal delicato umorismo di Carpaccio e di cento altri pittori religiosi. Che esso appaia nell’arte cristiana è naturale; che appaia nell’arte musulmana è assai più singolare, dato che ai musulmani è in teoria proibito scolpire immagini di cose viventi. Alcuni dicono che i musulmani persiani siano meno scrupolosi; ma qualunque sia la spiegazione, due leoni di aspetto altamente araldico sono scolpiti sopra quella porta saracena che i cristiani chiamano la porta di Santo Stefano; e i migliori intenditori sembrano concordare che, come tanta parte del guscio saracenico di Sion, essi furono almeno in parte copiati dagli scudi e dai cimieri dei Crociati.
E i leoni scolpiti sopra la porta di Santo Stefano potrebbero bene essere il testo per un intero libro sull’argomento. Poiché se essi indicano, per quanto indirettamente, la presenza dei Latini del dodicesimo secolo, indicano anche le fonti più antiche dalle quali la stessa vita latina era stata attinta. I due leoni incedono, passanti come direbbero gli araldi, in due direzioni opposte quasi come se si aggirassero avanti e indietro. E anche questo potrebbe bene essere simbolico come pure araldico. Poiché se i Crociati portarono il leone verso sud a dispetto della convenzionale fantasia della decorazione musulmana, fu solo perché i Romani avevano in precedenza portato il leone verso nord ai mari freddi e alle foreste selvagge. L’immagine del leone venne da nord a sud, solo perché l’idea del leone era venuta molto tempo prima da sud a nord. Il cristiano aveva un leone simbolico che non aveva mai visto, e il musulmano aveva un leone reale che rifiutava di ritrarre. Poiché potremmo dedurre dal caso di questa singola creatura il fatto che tutta la nostra civiltà venne dal Mediterraneo, e la follia di fingere che venisse dal Mare del Nord. Quelle due figure araldiche sopra la porta possono essere prese in prestito dallo scudo normanno o angioino ora inquartato nelle Armi Reali d’Inghilterra. Possono essere state copiate, direttamente o indirettamente, da quel grande re angioino d’Inghilterra il cui titolo lo accreditava del cuore di un leone. Possono avere in qualche lontana maniera la stessa ascendenza del vanto o dello scherzo dei nostri stessi giornali comici quando parlano del Leone britannico. Ma perché vi sono leoni, benché di origine francese o feudale, sulla bandiera d’Inghilterra? Vi potrebbero altrettanto bene essere cammelli o coccodrilli, per quanto riguarda l’apparente connessione con l’Inghilterra o con la Francia. Perché un re inglese fu descritto come avente il cuore di un leone, più che di una tigre? Perché le vostre vignette patriottiche minacciano il mondo con l’ira del Leone britannico; è davvero altrettanto strano come se lo mettessero in guardia contro lo stuzzicare la rabbia del rinoceronte britannico. Perché i principi francesi e inglesi non trovarono nei cinghiali selvatici, che erano gli oggetti della loro caccia, i soggetti della loro araldica? Se i Normanni erano davvero gli Uomini del Nord, i lupi di mare della pirateria scandinava, perché non esibivano tre lupi sui loro scudi? Perché John Bull non si è accontentato del toro inglese, o del bulldog inglese?
The answer might be put somewhat defiantly by saying that the very name of John Bull is foreign. The surname comes through France from Rome; and the Christian name comes through Rome from Palestine. If there had really been any justification for the Teutonic generalisation, we should expect the surname to be “ox” and not “bull”; and we should expect the hero standing as godfather to be Odin or Siegfried, and not the prophet who lived on locusts in the wilderness of Palestine or the mystic 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 ultimately because that blue sea has run like a blue thread through all the tapestries 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 obviously even truer of our use of the word “lion.” The later emblem is enough to 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 of the land, but more especially the sea in the middle of all the lands that mattered most to civilisation. One of these, and the one that in the long run has mattered most of all, was Palestine.
In this lies the deepest difference between a man like Richard the Lion Heart and any of the countless modern English soldiers in Palestine who have been quite as lion-hearted as he. His superiority was not moral but intellectual; it consisted in knowing where he was and why he was there. It arose from the fact that 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 Richard quite natural to go from one edge of it that happened to be called England 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 regard himself not merely as conquering but as re-conquering a realm. He was not like a man attacking total strangers on a hitherto undiscovered island. He was not opening up a new country, or giving his name to a new continent, and he could boast none of those ideals of imperial innovation which inspire the more enlightened pioneers, who exterminate tribes or extinguish republics 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 sentiments of one stepping on a new and nameless soil. Disregarding any dim and lingering legends among the natives, he may then have the honour of calling Sinai by the name of Mount Higgins, or marking on a new map the site of Bethlehem with the name of Brownsville. But King Richard, adventurous as he was, could not experience the full freshness of this sort of adventure. He was not riding into Asia thus romantically 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 be considered later. I am primarily speaking of the Empire as a pagan and political matter; and it is easy to see what was the meaning of the 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 anything that could be understood by a man standing as I have imagined myself standing, in the official area of Byzantium. When I have said 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 real revolution and novelty have come between them and their ancient sun. This may seem an enigma and a paradox; seeing that here a foreign religion has successfully fought and ruled. But indeed the enigma is also the explanation. In the East the continuity of culture has only been interrupted by negative things that Islam has done. In the West it has been interrupted by positive things that Christendom itself has done. In the West the past of Christendom has its perspective blocked up by its own creations; in the East it is a true perspective of interminable corridors, with round Byzantine arches and proud Byzantine pillars. That, I incline to fancy, is the real difference that a man come from the west of 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 absence of 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 should be 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 stiffening and growing sterile, and even the early successes of Islam may not have 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 felt the earth shaking with the march of mobs; and behind them came the 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 hope crying out in the old Roman tongue “Id Deus vult,” Rome was risen from the dead.
La risposta potrebbe essere data con una certa aria di sfida osservando che il nome stesso di John Bull è straniero. Il cognome giunge attraverso la Francia da Roma; e il nome di battesimo giunge attraverso Roma dalla Palestina. Se ci fosse stata davvero una qualche giustificazione per la generalizzazione teutonica, ci aspetteremmo che il cognome fosse «bue» e non «toro»; e ci aspetteremmo che l’eroe posto a padrino fosse Odino o Sigfrido, e non il profeta che si nutriva di locuste nel deserto della Palestina o il mistico che meditava con i suoi occhi ardenti sui mari azzurri intorno a Patmos. Se il nostro eroe nazionale è John Bull e non Olaf il Bue, ciò è in ultima analisi perché quel mare azzurro è passato come un filo azzurro attraverso tutti gli arazzi delle nostre tradizioni; o, in altre parole, perché la nostra cultura, come quella della Francia o delle Fiandre, venne in origine dal Mediterraneo. E se questo è vero per il nostro uso della parola «toro», è ovviamente ancor più vero per il nostro uso della parola «leone». L’emblema più tardo basta a mostrare che la cultura venne non solo dal Mediterraneo, ma dal versante meridionale non meno che da quello settentrionale del Mediterraneo. In altre parole, l’Impero Romano correva tutt’intorno al grande mare interno; il cui nome stesso significava non semplicemente il mare in mezzo alle terre, ma più in particolare il mare in mezzo a tutte le terre che più contavano per la civiltà. Una di queste, e quella che alla lunga ha contato più di tutte, era la Palestina.
In ciò risiede la più profonda differenza fra un uomo come Riccardo Cuor di Leone e uno qualunque degli innumerevoli soldati inglesi moderni in Palestina che sono stati tanto leonini quanto lui. La sua superiorità non era morale ma intellettuale; consisteva nel sapere dove si trovava e perché vi si trovava. Nasceva dal fatto che al suo tempo rimaneva una sorta di memoria dell’Impero Romano, che alcuni avrebbero voluto ristabilire come Sacro Romano Impero. La Cristianità era ancora quasi un’unica comunità; e a Riccardo sembrava del tutto naturale andare da un lembo di essa che si dava il caso fosse chiamato Inghilterra al lembo opposto che si dava il caso fosse chiamato Palestina. Possiamo giudicarlo nel giusto o nel torto nella particolare contesa, possiamo giudicarlo innocente o senza scrupoli nei suoi metodi occasionali; ma non v’è quasi alcun dubbio che egli considerasse sé stesso non semplicemente come uno che conquistava, ma come uno che ri-conquistava un regno. Non era come un uomo che assale perfetti sconosciuti su un’isola fin allora non scoperta. Non stava aprendo un nuovo paese, né dando il proprio nome a un nuovo continente, e non poteva vantare nessuno di quegli ideali di innovazione imperiale che ispirano i più illuminati pionieri, i quali sterminano tribù o estinguono repubbliche per amore di una miniera d’oro o di un giacimento di petrolio. Un giorno, se il nostro moderno sistema educativo verrà ulteriormente ampliato e imposto, tutto il passato della Palestina potrà essere interamente dimenticato; e un viaggiatore in giorni più felici potrà provare tutti i sentimenti più freschi di chi mette piede su un suolo nuovo e senza nome. Trascurando qualsiasi vaga e persistente leggenda fra gli indigeni, egli potrà allora avere l’onore di chiamare il Sinai col nome di Monte Higgins, o di segnare su una nuova carta il sito di Betlemme col nome di Brownsville. Ma re Riccardo, per avventuroso che fosse, non poté sperimentare la piena freschezza di questo genere di avventura. Non stava cavalcando in Asia in modo così romantico e a caso; anzi, non stava cavalcando affatto in Asia. Stava cavalcando nell’Europa Irredenta.
Ma questo è anticipare ciò che accadde più tardi e che più tardi dovrà essere considerato. Sto parlando anzitutto dell’Impero come cosa pagana e politica; ed è facile vedere quale fosse il significato della Crociata sul versante meramente pagano e politico. In una frase, esso significava che Roma doveva riconquistare ciò che Bisanzio non aveva saputo tenere. Ma qualcosa d’ulteriore era accaduto per quel che riguarda Roma, qualcosa di più di quanto potesse essere compreso da un uomo che stesse, come ho immaginato me stesso stare, nell’area ufficiale di Bisanzio. Quando ho detto che la civiltà bizantina sembrava ancora regnare, intendevo una curiosa impressione che, in queste province orientali, sebbene l’Impero fosse stato più sconfitto, era stato però meno turbato. C’è una maggiore limpidezza in quell’aria antica; e minori nubi di reale rivoluzione e novità sono venute frapporsi fra loro e il loro antico sole. Ciò può sembrare un enigma e un paradosso; visto che qui una religione straniera ha combattuto e governato con successo. Ma in verità l’enigma è anche la spiegazione. In Oriente la continuità della cultura è stata interrotta solo dalle cose negative che l’Islam ha fatto. In Occidente è stata interrotta dalle cose positive che la Cristianità stessa ha fatto. In Occidente il passato della Cristianità ha la prospettiva ostruita dalle proprie creazioni; in Oriente è una vera prospettiva di corridoi interminabili, con tondi archi bizantini e fieri pilastri bizantini. Questa, sono incline a credere, è la reale differenza che un uomo venuto dall’Occidente d’Europa avverte nell’Oriente d’Europa: è una lacuna o un vuoto. È l’assenza dell’energia grottesca del Gotico, l’assenza degli esperimenti del parlamento e della rappresentanza popolare, l’assenza della cavalleria medievale, l’assenza della nazionalità moderna. In Oriente la civiltà continuò a vivere, o, se si vuole, si trascinò; in Occidente morì e rinacque. Ma per lungo tempo, va ricordato, all’Oriente dev’essere sembrato semplicemente che essa fosse morta. I regni di Roma erano scomparsi in nubi di guerra barbarica, mentre i regni di Bisanzio erano ancora dorati e sfarzosi al sole. Gli uomini dell’Oriente non si rendevano conto che il loro splendore si stava irrigidendo e facendo sterile, e persino i primi successi dell’Islam possono non aver loro rivelato che il loro dominio non era solo rigido ma fragile. Fu qualcos’altro che era destinato a rivelarlo. Le Crociate significarono molte cose; ma in questa faccenda significarono una cosa sola, che fu come una parola portata loro sul grande vento di ponente. E la parola era come quella di un’antica canzone irlandese: «L’Occidente è desto». Udirono in lontananza le grida di folle sconosciute e sentirono la terra tremare al passo di moltitudini; e dietro di loro veniva il calpestìo dei cavalli e il fragore delle bardature e dei corni di guerra; nuovi re che gridavano comandi e schiere di giovani pieni di speranza che gridavano nell’antica lingua romana «Id Deus vult»: Roma era risorta dai morti.
Almost any traveller could select out of the countless things that 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 in the most random fashion; and the man to whom it comes can only speak for himself without any attempt at a critical comparison with others. In this sense I may say that the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem contains something impossible to describe, yet driving me beyond expression to a desperate attempt at description. The church is entered through a door so small that it it might fairly be 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 wall was pierced in this way to prevent the appearance of a camel during divine service, but even that explanation would only repeat the 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 been turned into a fortress, windows are bricked up and walls thickened in some or all of its thousand years of religious war. In the blank spaces above the little doorway hung in old times that strange mosaic of the Magi which once saved the holy place from destruction, in the strange interlude between the decline of Rome and the rise of Mahomet. For when the Persians who had destroyed Jerusalem rode out in triumph to the village of Bethlehem, they looked up and saw above 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 tradition containing an eternal truth, had drawn the three wise men with the long robes and high head-dresses of Persia. The worshippers of the sun had come westward for the worship of the star. But whether that part of the church were bare and bald as it is now 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 twilight to a grey daylight, the first impression is that of two rows of towering pillars. They are of a dark red stone having much of the appearance of a dark red marble; and they are crowned with 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 altar, is the dark stairway that descends under the canopies of rock to the stable where Christ was born.
Of all the things I have seen the most convincing, and as it were crushing, were these red columns of Constantine. In explanation of the sentiment there are a thousand things that want saying and cannot be said. Never have I felt so vividly the great fact of our history; that the Christian religion is like a huge bridge across a boundless sea, which alone connects us with the men who made the world, and yet have utterly vanished from the world. To put it curtly and very crudely on this point alone it was possible to sympathise with a Roman and not merely to admire him. All his pagan remains are but sublime fossils; for we can never know the life that was in them. We know that here and there was a temple to Venus or there an altar to Vesta; but who knows or pretends to know what he really felt about Venus or Vesta? Was a Vestal Virgin like a Christian Virgin, or something profoundly different? Was he quite serious about Venus, like a diabolist, or merely frivolous about Venus, like a Christian? If the spirit was different from ours we 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 images in the end.
In any case I can never recapture in words the waves of sympathy with strange things that went through me in that twilight 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 triumph through the whole world; here in the evening of its days it came trailing in all its panoply in the pathway of the three kings. For it came following not only a falling but a fallen star and one that dived before them into a birthplace darker than a grave. And the lord of the laurels, clad in his sombre crimson, looked down into that darkness, and then looked up, and saw that all the stars in his own sky were dead. They were deities no longer but only a brilliant dust, scattered down the vain void of Lucretius. The stars were as stale as they were strong; they would never die for they had never lived; they were cursed with an incurable immortality that was but the extension of mortality; they were chained 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 and seemingly fixed mood of nearly all the ancients. Only above the black hole 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 beside the plain stable of the Nativity. But it seems strange that they always rebuke it as if it were a blind vulgarity like the red plush 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 an artistic contrast. Indeed it is an insensibility of a somewhat tiresome kind, which can often be noticed in those sceptics who make a science of folk-lore. The mark of them is that they fail to see the importance of finding the upshot or climax of a tale, even when it is a fairy-tale. Since the old devotional doctors and designers were never tired of insisting on the sufferings of the holy poor to the point of squalor, and simultaneously insisting on the sumptuousness of the subject kings to the point of swagger, it would really seem not entirely improbable that they may have been conscious of the contrast themselves. I confess this is an insensibility, not to say stupidity, in the sceptics and simplifiers, which I find 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 of the story, considered as a story or even considered as a lie. And a man who sees the rags and the royal purple as a clumsy inconsistency is merely missing the meaning of a deliberate design. He is like a man who should hear the story of King Cophetua and the beggar maid and say doubtfully that it was hard to recognise it as really a mariage de convenance; a phrase which (I may remark in parenthesis but not 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 maid conventionally a suitable match; and nobody would ever have thought the story worth telling if it had been. It is like saying that 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 inconsistent with 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 even say the joke of it. I do not object to his rejecting the story as a tall story; but I find it deplorable when he cannot see the point or end or upshot of the tall story, the very pinnacle or spire of that sublime tower.
Quasi ogni viaggiatore potrebbe scegliere, fra le innumerevoli cose che ha guardato, le poche cose che ha visto. Intendo le cose che gli giungono con una curiosa chiarezza; sì che egli le vede realmente essere ciò che sa che esse sono. Potrei quasi dire che riesce a credere in esse benché le abbia viste. Non può esservi regola su questa realizzazione; sembra giungere nel modo più casuale; e l’uomo a cui giunge può parlare soltanto per sé stesso, senza alcun tentativo di paragone critico con gli altri. In questo senso posso dire che la Chiesa della Natività a Betlemme contiene qualcosa di impossibile a descriversi, eppure tale da spingermi al di là di ogni espressione a un disperato tentativo di descrizione. Alla chiesa si accede attraverso una porta così piccola che si potrebbe a ragione chiamarla un foro, nella quale molti hanno visto, e io credo a ragione, il simbolo di una qualche idea di umiltà. Si dice anche che il muro fu forato in tal modo per impedire l’ingresso di un cammello durante il servizio divino, ma anche quella spiegazione non farebbe che ripetere la stessa suggestione attraverso la parabola della cruna dell’ago. Personalmente immaginerei che, in quanto lo scopo fosse pratico, esso mirasse a tener fuori animali assai più pericolosi dei cammelli, come, per esempio, i Turchi. Poiché l’intera chiesa è chiaramente stata trasformata in una fortezza, le finestre sono murate e le mura ispessite in alcuni o in tutti i suoi mille anni di guerra religiosa. Negli spazi vuoti sopra la piccola porta pendeva un tempo quello strano mosaico dei Magi che salvò una volta il luogo santo dalla distruzione, nello strano interludio fra il declino di Roma e l’ascesa di Maometto. Poiché quando i Persiani che avevano distrutto Gerusalemme cavalcarono in trionfo verso il villaggio di Betlemme, alzarono lo sguardo e videro sopra la porta un’immagine di pietra colorata, un’immagine di sé stessi. Seguivano una strana stella e adoravano un Bambino sconosciuto. Poiché un artista cristiano, seguendo qualche antica tradizione orientale che conteneva una verità eterna, aveva raffigurato i tre re magi con le lunghe vesti e gli alti copricapi della Persia. Gli adoratori del sole erano venuti verso occidente per l’adorazione della stella. Ma che quella parte della chiesa fosse spoglia e nuda come lo è ora, oppure colorata dalle immagini d’oro e di porpora dei Persiani, l’interno della chiesa sarebbe stato sempre, per contrasto, bruscamente oscuro. Man mano che la familiarità muta l’oscurità in penombra, e la penombra in una grigia luce diurna, la prima impressione è quella di due file di pilastri torreggianti. Sono di una pietra rosso cupo che ha molto dell’aspetto di un marmo rosso cupo; e sono coronati dall’acanto alla maniera della scuola corinzia. Furono scolpiti ed eretti per ordine di Costantino; e oltre di essi, all’altro capo della chiesa presso l’altare, è la scura scala che discende sotto i baldacchini di roccia alla stalla dove nacque Cristo.
Di tutte le cose che ho visto, le più convincenti, e per così dire schiaccianti, furono queste colonne rosse di Costantino. A spiegazione del sentimento vi sono mille cose che vorrebbero essere dette e non possono esserlo. Mai ho sentito così vividamente il gran fatto della nostra storia; che la religione cristiana è come un immenso ponte gettato su un mare sconfinato, che solo ci connette con gli uomini che fecero il mondo, eppure sono interamente svaniti dal mondo. Per dirla in modo brusco e assai crudo, su questo punto soltanto è possibile simpatizzare con un Romano e non semplicemente ammirarlo. Tutti i suoi resti pagani non sono che sublimi fossili; poiché non possiamo mai conoscere la vita che era in essi. Sappiamo che qua e là c’era un tempio a Venere o là un altare a Vesta; ma chi sa o pretende di sapere ciò che egli realmente sentiva riguardo a Venere o a Vesta? Una Vestale era come una Vergine cristiana, o qualcosa di profondamente diverso? Era del tutto serio riguardo a Venere, come un diabolista, o meramente frivolo riguardo a Venere, come un cristiano? Se lo spirito era diverso dal nostro non possiamo sperare di comprenderlo, e se lo spirito era simile al nostro, quello spirito era espresso in immagini che non lo esprimono più. Ma è qui che egli e io ci incontriamo; e salutiamo alla fine le medesime immagini.
In ogni caso non potrò mai ricatturare in parole le ondate di simpatia per cose strane che mi attraversarono in quella penombra dei pilastri altissimi, come giganti ammantati di porpora, che stavano immobili e guardavano giù dentro quell’oscuro foro nel suolo. Qui si arrestò quella civiltà imperiale, quando ebbe marciato in trionfo attraverso il mondo intero; qui, nella sera dei suoi giorni, essa venne trascinandosi in tutta la sua pompa sul sentiero dei tre re. Poiché venne seguendo non solo una stella cadente ma una stella caduta, e una che si tuffò dinanzi a loro dentro un luogo natale più oscuro di una tomba. E il signore degli allori, vestito del suo cupo cremisi, guardò giù in quell’oscurità, poi guardò in alto, e vide che tutte le stelle del suo proprio cielo erano morte. Non erano più divinità ma soltanto una brillante polvere, sparsa giù per il vano vuoto di Lucrezio. Le stelle erano tanto stantie quanto forti; non sarebbero mai morte perché non erano mai vissute; erano maledette da un’incurabile immortalità che non era che l’estensione della mortalità; erano incatenate nelle catene della causalità e immutabili come i morti. Non sono molti gli uomini nel mondo moderno che non conoscano quello stato d’animo, benché non sia stato scoperto dai moderni; fu lo stato d’animo finale e apparentemente fisso di quasi tutti gli antichi. Solo sopra il nero foro di Betlemme essi avevano visto una stella errare come una scintilla smarrita; ed essa aveva fatto ciò che gli eterni soli e pianeti non potevano fare. Era scomparsa.
Vi sono alcuni che risentono la presenza di tanta porpora accanto alla nuda stalla della Natività. Ma sembra strano che la rimproverino sempre come se fosse una cieca volgarità, come il felpato rosso di un parvenu; una mera insensibilità a una mera incongruenza. Poiché in realtà l’insensibilità è nei critici e non negli artisti. È un’insensibilità non a un’incongruenza accidentale ma a un contrasto artistico. Anzi, è un’insensibilità di un genere alquanto tedioso, che si può spesso notare in quegli scettici che fanno una scienza del folklore. Il loro marchio è che non riescono a vedere l’importanza di trovare l’esito o il culmine di un racconto, anche quando è una fiaba. Poiché gli antichi dottori e disegnatori devoti non si stancavano mai di insistere sulle sofferenze dei santi poveri fino allo squallore, e insieme di insistere sulla sontuosità dei re soggetti fino alla spavalderia, sembrerebbe davvero non del tutto improbabile che essi potessero essere consapevoli del contrasto essi stessi. Confesso che questa è un’insensibilità, per non dire stupidità, negli scettici e nei semplificatori, che trovo molto estenuante. Non mi disturba che un uomo non creda a una storia, ma confesso che mi annoia a morte (se mi è concessa l’espressione) un uomo che sa raccontare una storia senza vedere il senso della storia, considerata come storia o persino considerata come menzogna. E un uomo che vede gli stracci e la porpora regale come una goffa incoerenza non fa che mancare il significato di un disegno deliberato. È come un uomo che, udendo la storia di re Cofetua e della fanciulla mendica, dicesse dubbioso che era difficile riconoscere in essa realmente un mariage de convenance; frase che (posso osservarlo per inciso ma non senza passione) non è il francese per «matrimonio di convenienza», più di quanto hors d’œuvre sia il francese per «senza lavoro»; ma può più rettamente rendersi in inglese come «un partito adatto». Ma nessuno pensava che il partito del re e della fanciulla mendica fosse convenzionalmente un partito adatto; e nessuno avrebbe mai pensato che la storia valesse la pena d’esser narrata se lo fosse stato. È come dire che Diogene, rimanendo nella sua botte dopo l’offerta di Alessandro, dovesse essere ignaro delle opportunità dell’architettura greca; o come dire che Nabucodonosor che mangia l’erba è chiaramente incoerente con l’etichetta di corte, o non si trova in alcun manuale di cucina alla moda. Non mi disturba lo scettico erudito che dice che è una leggenda o una menzogna; ma piango per lui quando non riesce a vedere il nòcciolo della cosa, potrei persino dire lo scherzo della cosa. Non ho nulla in contrario che egli respinga la storia come una fandonia; ma trovo deplorevole che non riesca a vedere il senso o il fine o l’esito della fandonia, il pinnacolo stesso o la guglia di quella sublime torre.
This dull type of doubt clouds the consideration of many sacred 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 contrast which Christians in ten thousand hymns, songs and sermons have incessantly 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 imperial pomp 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 imperial as to make the carpenter humble; if we wish to make plain to plain people that before this shrine kings are no better than shepherds, it is as necessary that the kings should have crowns as that the shepherds should have crooks. And if modern intellectuals do not know it, it is because nobody has really been mad enough even to try to make modern intellectualism popular. Now this conception of pomp as a popular thing, this conception of a concession to common human nature in colour and symbol, has a considerable bearing on many misunderstandings about the original enthusiasm that spread from the cave of Bethlehem over the whole Roman Empire. It is a curious fact that the moderns have mostly rebuked historic Christianity, not for being narrow, but for being broad. They have rebuked it because it did prove itself the desire of all nations, because it did satisfy the cravings of many creeds, because it did prove itself to idolaters as something as magic as their idols, or did prove itself to patriots something as lovable as their native land. In many other matters indeed, besides this popular art, we may find examples of the same illogical prejudice. Nothing betrays more curiously the bias of historians against the Christian faith than the fact that they blame in Christians the 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 later as proofs of Christian corruption. It was noble of pagans to be 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 it satisfied the Greek intellect and wielded the Roman power.
Now on the first example of the attempt of theology to meet the claims of philosophy I will not here dwell at length. I will only remark in passing that it is an utter fallacy to suggest, as for instance Mr. Wells suggests in his fascinating Outline of History, that the subtleties of theology were a 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 humanitarians of a broad religion more commonly offer as a model of simplicity than that most mystical affirmation “God is Love.” And there is no theological quarrel of the Councils of the Church which they, especially Mr. Wells, more commonly deride as bitter and barren than that at the Council of Nicea about the Co-eternity of the Divine Son. Yet the subtle statement is simply a metaphysical explanation of the simple statement; and it would be quite possible even to make it a popular explanation, by saying that God could not love when there was nothing to be loved. Now the Church Councils were 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 considered more calmly by experts. But it may reasonably be suggested, I think, that the concentration of the Greek intellect on these things did gradually pass from a popular to a more professional or official thing; and that the traces of it have finally tended to fade from the official religion of the East. It was far otherwise with the more poetical and therefore more practical religion of the West. It was far otherwise with that direct appeal to pathos and affection in the highly coloured picture of the Shepherd and the King. In the West the world not only prolonged its life but recovered its youth. That is the meaning of the movement I have described as 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 exactly that strange and simple energy that belongs to the story of Bethlehem. Not in vain had Constantine come clad in purple to look down into that dark cave at his feet; nor did the star mislead him when it seemed to 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 world of death, and their journey ended in the land of the living. They came out into a world more wonderful than the eyes of men have looked on before or after; they heard the hammers of hundreds of happy craftsmen working for once according to their own will, and saw St. Francis walking with his halo a cloud of birds.
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Questo ottuso tipo di dubbio offusca la considerazione di molte cose sacre, come fa con quella del santuario di Betlemme. Esso è applicato alla realtà divina di Betlemme stessa, come quando gli scettici ancora sogghignano sulla piccolezza, sul localismo, sulla particolarità provinciale e sull’oscurità di quella divina origine; come se i cristiani potessero essere confusi e ridotti al silenzio da un contrasto che i cristiani, in diecimila inni, canti e sermoni, hanno incessantemente gridato e proclamato. In questo caso capitale, naturalmente, vale lo stesso principio. Un uomo può ritenere il racconto incredibile; ma non sarebbe mai stato narrato affatto se non fosse stato incongruo. Ma questo caso particolare del contrasto minore, quello fra la pompa imperiale e la rustica povertà del falegname e dei pastori, è da solo sufficiente a illustrare la strana fallacia artistica in gioco. Se il punto è che un imperatore venne ad adorare un falegname, è artisticamente altrettanto necessario rendere l’imperatore imperiale quanto rendere umile il falegname; se vogliamo rendere chiaro alla gente semplice che davanti a questo santuario i re non sono migliori dei pastori, è tanto necessario che i re abbiano corone quanto che i pastori abbiano bastoni. E se gli intellettuali moderni non lo sanno, è perché nessuno è stato davvero abbastanza pazzo persino da provare a rendere popolare l’intellettualismo moderno. Ora questa concezione della pompa come cosa popolare, questa concezione di una concessione alla comune natura umana nel colore e nel simbolo, ha una considerevole attinenza con molti fraintendimenti riguardo all’originario entusiasmo che si diffuse dalla grotta di Betlemme su tutto l’Impero Romano. È un fatto curioso che i moderni hanno perlopiù rimproverato il cristianesimo storico non per essere angusto, ma per essere ampio. L’hanno rimproverato perché si dimostrò davvero il desiderio di tutte le nazioni, perché soddisfece davvero le brame di molte fedi, perché si dimostrò davvero agli idolatri qualcosa di altrettanto magico dei loro idoli, o si dimostrò ai patrioti qualcosa di altrettanto amabile della loro terra natale. In molte altre questioni invero, oltre a quest’arte popolare, possiamo trovare esempi dello stesso illogico pregiudizio. Nulla tradisce più curiosamente la parzialità degli storici contro la Fede cristiana del fatto che essi biasimano nei cristiani proprio le umane indulgenze che hanno lodato nei pagani. Le stesse arti e allegorie, le stesse fraseologie e filosofie, che appaiono prima come prove di salute pagana, spuntano più tardi come prove di corruzione cristiana. Era nobile per i pagani essere pagani, ma era imperdonabile per i cristiani essere paganizzati. Non si stancano mai di parlarci della gloria che fu la Grecia, della grandezza che fu Roma, ma la Chiesa era infame perché soddisfaceva l’intelletto greco e brandiva la potenza romana.
Ora, sul primo esempio del tentativo della teologia di rispondere alle pretese della filosofia non mi soffermerò qui a lungo. Rileverò solo di passaggio che è una fallacia assoluta suggerire, come per esempio suggerisce il signor Wells nel suo affascinante Outline of History, che le sottigliezze della teologia fossero una mera decadenza dalle semplicità della religione. La religione può essere migliore se semplice per coloro che la trovano semplice; ma vi saranno inevitabilmente molti che in ogni caso la trovano sottile, fra coloro che ci riflettono e specialmente fra coloro che ne dubitano. Per fare un esempio, non v’è detto che gli umanitari di una religione ampia offrano più comunemente come modello di semplicità di quella affermazione così mistica: «Dio è Amore». E non v’è disputa teologica dei Concili della Chiesa che essi, e specialmente il signor Wells, più comunemente deridano come amara e sterile di quella al Concilio di Nicea sulla Coeternità del Figlio divino. Eppure la sottile enunciazione è semplicemente una spiegazione metafisica della semplice enunciazione; e sarebbe persino del tutto possibile farne una spiegazione popolare, dicendo che Dio non poteva amare quando non c’era nulla da amare. Ora i Concili della Chiesa erano in origine assemblee assai popolari, per non dire tumultuose. Tutt’altro che antidemocratici, erano piuttosto troppo democratici; la vera accusa contro di essi era che facevano passare con voti fragorosi, e non senza violenza, cose che dovevano poi essere considerate più pacatamente dagli esperti. Ma può ragionevolmente suggerirsi, io credo, che la concentrazione dell’intelletto greco su queste cose passò gradualmente da una cosa popolare a una più professionale o ufficiale; e che le tracce di essa hanno alla fine teso a svanire dalla religione ufficiale dell’Oriente. Fu tutt’altrimenti con la religione più poetica e perciò più pratica dell’Occidente. Fu tutt’altrimenti con quel diretto appello al pathos e all’affetto nell’immagine dai vividi colori del Pastore e del Re. In Occidente il mondo non solo prolungò la sua vita ma ricuperò la sua giovinezza. È questo il significato del movimento che ho descritto come il risveglio dell’Occidente e la Resurrezione di Roma. E tutto il senso di quel movimento, come mi propongo di suggerire, fu che esso fu un movimento popolare. Era ritornato con esattamente quella strana e semplice energia che appartiene alla storia di Betlemme. Non invano Costantino era venuto vestito di porpora a guardare giù dentro quella scura grotta ai suoi piedi; né la stella lo aveva sviato quando parve terminare nelle viscere della terra. Gli uomini che lo seguirono passarono oltre, per così dire, attraverso il basso e volteggiato tunnel dei Secoli Bui; ma avevano trovato la via, e l’unica via, fuori da quel mondo di morte, e il loro viaggio terminò nella terra dei viventi. Uscirono in un mondo più meraviglioso di quanto occhi d’uomo abbiano contemplato prima o dopo; udirono i martelli di centinaia di felici artigiani che lavoravano per una volta secondo la propria volontà, e videro san Francesco camminare con la sua aureola in una nube di uccelli.
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CHAPTER XI
THE MEANING OF THE CRUSADE
There are three examples of Western work on the great eastern slope of the Mount of Olives; and they form a sort of triangle illustrating the truth about the different influences of the West on the East. At the foot of the hill is the garden kept by the Franciscans on the alleged site of Gethsemane, and containing the hoary olive that is supposed to be the terrible tree of the agony of Christ. Given the great age and slow growth of the olives, the tradition is not so unreasonable as some may suppose. But whether or not it is historically right, it is not artistically wrong. The instinct, if it was only an instinct, that made men fix upon this strange growth of grey and twisted wood, was a true imaginative instinct. One of the strange qualities of this strange Southern tree is its almost startling hardness; accidentally to strike the branch of an olive is like striking rock. With its stony surface, stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is often more like a grotto than a tree. Hence it does not seem so unnatural that it should be treated as a holy grotto; or that this strange vegetation should claim to stand for ever like a sculptured monument. Even the shimmering or shivering silver foliage of the living olive might well have a legend like that of the aspen; as if it had grown grey with fear from the apocalyptic paradox of a divine vision 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 statement of all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew; credo quia impossibile.
Around this terrible spot the Franciscans have done something which will strike 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 way that 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 sunshine with the awful shadow in the centre is certainly an incongruity in 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 would be something like this; suppose we imagine a company of children, such as those whom Christ blessed in Jerusalem, afterwards put permanently 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 red daisies or yellow marigolds. I really do not know that there is anything better that grown up people could do, since anything that 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 dared to be cheerful. It may be too awful an adventure of the imagination to imagine Christ in that garden. But there is not the smallest difficulty about imagining St. Francis there; and that is something to say of an institution which is eight hundred years old.
Immediately above this little garden, overshadowing and almost overhanging it, is a gorgeous gilded building with golden domes and minarets glittering in the sun, and filling a splendid situation with almost shameless splendour; the Russian church built over the upper part of the garden, belonging to the Orthodox-Greeks. Here again many Western travellers will be troubled; and will think that 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 sight of 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 art as Aladdin has a place in literature; especially since it is oriental literature. Those wise missionaries in China who were not afraid to depict the Twelve Apostles in the costume of Chinamen might 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 child and 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 sort of 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 the German 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 modernity compared with the things around, with the quaint garden of the Franciscans or the fantastic temple of the Russians. It is what I can only describe as a handsome building; rather as the 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 dizzy tower to the bottom of its deepest foundations there is not one line or 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 pretentious in a good and innocent way. What annoys me about it is that it was 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 except how to build it. We feel that they accumulated on that spot all the learning and organisation and information and wealth of the world, to do this one particular thing; and then did it wrong. They did it wrong, not through superstition, not through fanatical exaggeration, not through provincial ignorance, but through pure, profound, internal, intellectual incompetence; that intellectual incompetence which so often goes with intellectual pride. I will mention only one matter out of a hundred. All the columns in 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 slender but the capital is not only big but bulging; and it has the air of bulging downwards, as if pressing heavily on something too slender to support it. This is false, not to any of the particular schools 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 of a tree, like the jet of a fountain or even like the rush of a rocket. But a slender thing beneath, obviously oppressed by a bloated thing above, suggests weakness by one of those miraculous mistakes that are as precisely wrong as masterpieces are precisely right. And to all this is added the intolerable intuition; that the Russians and the Franciscans, even if we credit them with fantastic ignorance, are at least looking up at the sky; and we know how the learned Germans would look down upon them, from their monstrous tower upon the hill.
CAPITOLO XI
IL SIGNIFICATO DELLA CROCIATA
Ci sono tre esempi di opere occidentali sul grande versante orientale del Monte degli Ulivi; e formano una sorta di triangolo che illustra la verità riguardo alle diverse influenze dell’Occidente sull’Oriente. Alla base della collina c’è il giardino curato dai Francescani sul presunto sito del Getsemani, e che contiene l’ulivo secolare che si suppone sia l’albero terribile dell’agonia di Cristo. Data la grande età e la crescita lenta degli ulivi, la tradizione non è così irragionevole come alcuni possono supporre. Ma che sia o meno storicamente corretta, non è artisticamente sbagliata. L’istinto, se era solo un istinto, che ha spinto gli uomini a fissarsi su questa strana crescita di legno grigio e contorto, era un vero istinto immaginativo. Una delle strane qualità di questo strano albero meridionale è la sua durezza quasi sorprendente; colpire accidentalmente il ramo di un ulivo è come colpire una roccia. Con la sua superficie pietrosa, la statura stentata e le strane buche e cavità, spesso assomiglia più a una grotta che a un albero. Da qui non sembra così innaturale che venga trattato come una santa grotta; o che questa strana vegetazione rivendichi di stare in piedi per sempre come un monumento scolpito. Anche il fogliame argenteo tremolante o vibrante dell’ulivo vivente potrebbe ben avere una leggenda simile a quella del pioppo; come se fosse diventato grigio per paura dall’apocalittico paradosso di una visione divina della morte. Un bambino proveniente da uno dei villaggi mi disse, in un inglese stentato, che era il luogo dove Dio diceva le sue preghiere. Io per primo non potrei chiedere una dichiarazione più bella o più sfidante di tutto ciò che separa il cristiano dal musulmano o dall’ebreo; credo quia impossibile.
Attorno a questo terribile luogo i francescani hanno fatto qualcosa che colpirà molte persone buone e riflessive come fantasticamente inadeguato; e che colpisce me come fantasticamente ma precisamente giusto. Hanno disposto il giardino semplicemente come un giardino, in un modo che è del tutto naturale perché del tutto artificiale. Hanno fatto aiuole a forma di stelle e di lune, e le hanno colorate con fiori come quelli nel cortile di una casetta. La combinazione di questi vividi motivi al sole con la terribile ombra al centro è certamente un’incongruenza nel senso di un contrasto. Ma è un contrasto poetico, come quello di uccelli che nidificano in un tempio o di fiori che crescono su una tomba. Il modo migliore di suggerire ciò che io per primo provo al riguardo sarebbe qualcosa di simile a questo; supponiamo d’immaginare una compagnia di bambini, come quelli che Cristo benedisse in Gerusalemme, poi posti permanentemente a custodia di un campo colmo del suo dolore; è probabile che, se potessero farne qualcosa, farebbero qualcosa di simile a questo. Potrebbero ritagliarlo in bizzarre forme e punteggiarlo di rosse pratoline o di gialle calendule. Davvero non so se vi sia nulla di meglio che gli adulti potrebbero fare, poiché qualunque cosa il più grande di essi potesse fare dovrebbe, dovrebbe apparire altrettanto piccola. “Oserò io, il moscerino che danza nel Tuo raggio, di essere reverente?” I francescani non hanno osato essere reverenti; hanno osato soltanto essere allegri. Può essere un’avventura troppo tremenda dell’immaginazione immaginare Cristo in quel giardino. Ma non c’è la minima difficoltà a immaginarvi san Francesco; e questo è qualcosa da dire di un’istituzione che ha ottocento anni.
Immediatamente sopra questo piccolo giardino, che lo sovrasta e quasi lo incombe, sta uno sfarzoso edificio dorato con cupole d’oro e minareti scintillanti al sole, che colma una posizione splendida con quasi spudorato splendore; la chiesa russa costruita sulla parte superiore del giardino, appartenente ai greco-ortodossi. Anche qui molti viaggiatori occidentali saranno turbati; e penseranno che quell’edificio dorato somigli troppo a un palazzo fatato di una pantomima. Ma anche qui io dissentirò da loro, benché forse meno fermamente. Può darsi che il piacere sia puerile piuttosto che infantile; ma posso immaginare un bambino battere le mani alla sola vista di quelle grandi cupole simili a bolle d’oro contro il cielo azzurro. È un po’ come il Palazzo di Aladino, ma ha un posto nell’arte come Aladino ha un posto nella letteratura; specialmente poiché si tratta di letteratura orientale. Quei saggi missionari in Cina che non ebbero timore di raffigurare i Dodici Apostoli in costume da cinesi avrebbero potuto costruire una chiesa simile in una terra di scintillanti moschee. E poiché si dice che il russo abbia in sé qualcosa del bambino e qualcosa dell’orientale, uno stile così può essere assai sincero, e avere persino una certa semplicità nel suo splendore. È genuino nel suo genere; fu costruito per coloro cui piace; e coloro cui non piace possono guardare qualcos’altro. Questa sorta di cosa può dirsi pacchiana, ma non è ciò che io chiamo meretricio. Ciò che io chiamo veramente meretricio si può trovare ancora più in alto sul colle; che torreggia verso il cielo e domina tutte le valli.
La natura della differenza, credo, merita di essere notata. L’Ospizio Tedesco, che serviva come una sorta di palazzo per l’ Imperatore Tedesco, è un edificio molto grande con una torre molto alta, progettato, credo, con grande efficienza, solidità e comfort, e dotato di mille cose che ne segnalano la modernità rispetto alle cose intorno, al pittoresco giardino dei Francescani o al fantastico tempio dei Russi. È quello che posso solo descrivere come un edificio imponente; piuttosto come i più volgari degli spiritosi vittoriani parlavano di una bella donna. Definendolo un edificio imponente intendo dire che dalla cima della sua torre vertiginosa al fondo delle sue fondamenta più profonde non c’è una linea né un colore di bellezza. Questo fatto negativo, tuttavia, sarebbe nulla; potrebbe essere onestamente brutto e utilitario come una fabbrica o una prigione; ma non lo è. È tanto pretenzioso quanto la cupola dorata sotto di esso; e il suo essere pretenzioso è malvagio, mentre quello dell’altra è buono e innocente. Quello che mi infastidisce in esso è che non fu costruito da bambini, né tanto meno da selvaggi, ma da professori; e i professori potevano professare l’arte senza poterla praticare. Gli architetti sapevano tutto di un edificio romanico tranne come costruirlo. Si ha la sensazione che abbiano accumulato in quel punto tutto il sapere, l’organizzazione e le informazioni del mondo, per fare questa cosa particolare; e poi l’hanno fatta male. L’hanno fatta male, non per superstizione, né per fanatica esagerazione, né per ignoranza provinciale, ma per pura, profonda, interna incompetenza intellettuale; quell’incompetenza intellettuale che così spesso va di pari passo con l’orgoglio intellettuale. Citerò solo una questione su cento. Tutte le colonne nella Cappella del Kaiser sono in un certo senso molto adatte al loro posto; ognuna ha la testa gonfia. La colonna stessa è slanciata, ma il capitello non è solo grande ma sporgente; e sembra sporgere verso il basso, come se gravasse pesantemente su qualcosa di troppo slanciato per sostenerlo. Questo è falso, non rispetto a nessuna delle particolari scuole di architettura di cui i professori possono leggere nelle biblioteche, ma all’idea istintiva più interna dell’architettura stessa. Un capitello normanno può essere pesante perché la colonna normanna è spessa, e l’insieme esprime una massività e un riposo elefantini. E una colonna gotica può essere slanciata, perché la sua forza è energia; ed è espressa nella sua linea, che si protende verso l’alto come la vita di un albero, come il getto di una fontana o anche come lo scatto di un razzo. Ma una cosa slanciata in basso, ovviamente oppressa da una cosa gonfia sopra, suggerisce debolezza con uno di quegli errori miracolosi che sono esattamente sbagliati quanto i capolavori sono esattamente giusti. E a tutto ciò si aggiunge l’intollerabile intuizione; che i Russi e i Francescani, anche se gli attribuiamo una fantastica ignoranza, stanno almeno guardando il cielo; e sappiamo come i dotti Tedeschi li avrebbero guardati dall’alto, dalla loro mostruosa torre sulla collina.
And this is as true of the moral as of the artistic elements in the modern Jerusalem. To show that I am not unjustly partisan, I will say frankly that I see little to complain of in that common subject of complaint; the mosaic portrait of the Emperor on the ceiling of the chapel. It is but one among many figures; and it is not an unknown practice to include a figure of the founder in such church decorations. The real example of that startling moral stupidity which marked the 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 of the actual fact; and merely records in outline and relief the temporary masquerade 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 lunatic a proceeding than if he had filled the whole ceiling with cherub heads with his own features, or festooned all the walls with one ornamental 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 victory and supremacy of the Turks. In other words, he came to Jerusalem 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 those circumstances 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 with the 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 all the cant of newspaper nationality, between the English and the Germans (who were classed together by the same newspapers a little time before 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 shield of a Red Cross Knight.
It is obvious enough that Palmerston would have said that he cared no more for the Crusade than for the Siege of Troy; that his diplomacy was directed by practical patriotic considerations of the moment; and that he regarded the religious wars of the twelfth century as a rubbish heap of remote superstitions. In this he would be quite wrong, but quite intelligible and quite sincere; an English aristocrat of the nineteenth century inheriting from the English aristocrats of the eighteenth century; whose views were simply those of Voltaire. And these things are something of an allegory. For the Voltairian version of the Crusades is still by far the most reasonable of all merely hostile views of the Crusades. If they were not a creative movement of religion, then they were simply a destructive movement of superstition; and whether we agree with Voltaire in calling it superstition or with Villehardouin in calling it religion, at least both these very clear-headed Frenchmen would agree that the motive did exist and did explain the facts. But just as there is a clumsy German building with statues that at once patronise and parody the Crusaders, so there is a clumsy German theory that at once patronises and minimises the Crusades. According to this theory 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. Louis were not, as Villehardouin would say, fighting for the truth; they were not even, as Voltaire would say, fighting for what they thought 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 new and unexpected nomadism. They were not inspired either by faith or fanaticism, but by an unusually aimless taste for foreign travel. This theory that the war of the two great religions could be explained by “Wanderlust” was current about twenty years ago among the 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 been patient 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 recover the old Teutonic theory of the Folk-Wandering of Peter the Hermit was 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 most loyal 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 Hospice on the hill it was put together with great care and knowledge and it is rotten from top to bottom. I do not understand, for that matter, why that alliance which we enjoy with Mr. Pound should 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 merely through the same vague nomadic need as the Christian Army in Palestine. Surely Pershing as well as Peter the Hermit was merely a rather restless gentleman who found his health improved by frequent change of scene. The Americans said, and perhaps thought, that they were fighting for democracy; and the Crusaders said, and perhaps thought, that they were fighting for Christianity. But as we know what the Crusaders meant better than they did themselves, I cannot quite understand why we do not enjoy the same valuable omniscience about 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 him and 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 article in an envelope and put it in a pillar-box. It is vain to correct by cold logic the power of such primitive appetites; nature herself was behind the seemingly random thoughtlessness of the deed. And now that it is irrevocably done, he can look back on it and trace the large lines of an awful law of averages; wherein it is ruled by a ruthless necessity that a certain number of such Americans should write a certain number of such articles, as the leaves fall or the flowers return.
E ciò è vero degli elementi morali non meno che di quelli artistici nella Gerusalemme moderna. Per mostrare che non sono un partigiano ingiusto, dirò francamente che vedo poco di cui lamentarmi in quel comune oggetto di lamentela: il ritratto a mosaico dell’Imperatore sul soffitto della cappella. Non è che una figura fra molte; e non è pratica ignota includere una figura del fondatore in simili decorazioni di chiese. Il vero esempio di quella sconcertante stupidità morale che contrassegnò l’imperialismo barbaro può trovarsi in un’altra figura di cui, per quanto strano, sembra si sia presa considerevolmente minor nota. È tanto più notevole in quanto non è che un’ombra artistica del fatto reale; e non fa che registrare in profilo e in rilievo la temporanea mascherata in cui quell’uomo si aggirò in pieno giorno. Intendo il trucco davvero sbalorditivo di travestirsi da Crociato. Fu, date le circostanze, un procedere assai più ridicolo e lunatico che se avesse riempito l’intero soffitto di teste di cherubino coi propri lineamenti, o festonato tutte le pareti con un unico motivo ornamentale dei suoi baffi.
L’Imperatore tedesco venne a Gerusalemme sotto la scorta dei Turchi, come alleato dei Turchi, e unicamente in virtù della vittoria e della supremazia dei Turchi. In altre parole, venne a Gerusalemme unicamente perché i Crociati avevano perduto Gerusalemme; vi venne unicamente perché i Crociati erano stati sbaragliati, rovinati, macellati prima e dopo il disastro di Hattin: perché la Croce era caduta nel sangue dinanzi alla Mezzaluna, sotto la quale soltanto egli poteva entrare a cavallo in sicurezza. In tali circostanze travestirsi da Crociato, come per un ballo in maschera, era una mescolanza di follia e volgarità che letteralmente mozza il fiato. Non v’è affatto bisogno di biasimarlo per essere in alleanza coi Turchi; centinaia di persone sono state in alleanza coi Turchi; gli inglesi in particolare sono stati fin troppo in alleanza con essi. Ma se qualcuno vuol apprezzare la vera differenza, distinta da tutta la retorica della nazionalità da giornale, fra gli inglesi e i tedeschi (che venivano accomunati dagli stessi giornali poco tempo prima della guerra), prenda questo singolo episodio come banco di prova. Lord Palmerston, per esempio, era un fermo amico dei Turchi. Si immagini Lord Palmerston comparire in cotta di maglia e con lo scudo di un Cavaliere dalla Rossa Croce.
È abbastanza ovvio che Palmerston avrebbe detto che non gli importava della Crociata più di quanto gli importasse dell’assedio di Troia; che la sua diplomazia era guidata da pratiche considerazioni patriottiche del momento; e che considerava le guerre religiose del dodicesimo secolo come un mucchio di rifiuti di remote superstizioni. In questo avrebbe avuto del tutto torto, ma sarebbe stato del tutto comprensibile e del tutto sincero; un aristocratico inglese del diciannovesimo secolo che ereditava dagli aristocratici inglesi del diciottesimo secolo; le cui vedute erano semplicemente quelle di Voltaire. E queste cose hanno qualcosa di un’allegoria. Poiché la versione voltairiana delle Crociate è tuttora di gran lunga la più ragionevole fra tutte le vedute meramente ostili alle Crociate. Se esse non furono un movimento creativo di religione, allora furono semplicemente un movimento distruttivo di superstizione; e sia che concordiamo con Voltaire nel chiamarla superstizione, sia con Villehardouin nel chiamarla religione, almeno questi due lucidissimi francesi concorderebbero che il movente esisteva davvero e spiegava davvero i fatti. Ma proprio come vi è un goffo edificio tedesco con statue che a un tempo patrocinano e parodiano i Crociati, così vi è una goffa teoria tedesca che a un tempo patrocina e minimizza le Crociate. Secondo questa teoria, la verità essenziale su una Crociata era che essa non era una Crociata. Era qualcosa che i professori, nei vecchi giorni prima della guerra, solevano chiamare una Migrazione di Popoli teutonica. Goffredo e san Luigi non combattevano, come direbbe Villehardouin, per la verità; non combattevano nemmeno, come direbbe Voltaire, per ciò che credevano essere la verità; questo era solo ciò che credevano di pensare, e in realtà stavano pensando a tutt’altra cosa. Non erano mossi né da pietà né da manovre clericali, ma da un nuovo e inatteso nomadismo. Non erano ispirati né dalla Fede né dal Fanatismo, ma da un insolito e sfaccendato gusto per i viaggi all’estero. Questa teoria, che la guerra delle due grandi religioni potesse essere spiegata con la «Wanderlust», era corrente circa vent’anni fa fra i professori di storia della Germania, e, con molte altre delle loro vedute, era spesso accettata dai professori di storia dell’Inghilterra. Fu inghiottita da un terremoto, insieme ad altri rifiuti, nell’anno 1914.
Da allora, per quanto ne so, l’unica persona che sia stata abbastanza paziente da dissotterrarla di nuovo è il signor Ezra Pound. Egli è ben noto come poeta americano; ed è, credo, un uomo di grande talento e di grande erudizione. Il suo tentativo di ricuperare la vecchia teoria teutonica della Migrazione di Popoli di Pietro l’Eremita fu espresso, tuttavia, in prosa; in un articolo sul New Age. Non ho ragione di dubitare che egli fosse da annoverare fra i più leali dei nostri alleati; ma è evidentemente uno di quelli che, pur senza essere affatto filotedeschi, riescono nondimeno a essere tedeschi. La teoria teutonica era assai teutonica; come l’Ospizio tedesco sul colle, era stata messa insieme con gran cura e sapienza, ed è marcia da cima a fondo. Non capisco, del resto, perché quell’alleanza di cui godiamo col signor Pound non debba essere trattata allo stesso modo dell’altro evento storico; o perché la guerra non debba essere un esempio della Wanderlust. Certamente l’Esercito americano in Francia dev’essere andato alla deriva verso oriente per il medesimo vago bisogno nomadico dell’Esercito cristiano in Palestina. Certamente Pershing, non meno che Pietro l’Eremita, era solo un signore piuttosto irrequieto che trovava la propria salute migliorata da frequenti cambi di scenario. Gli americani dicevano, e forse pensavano, di combattere per la democrazia; e i Crociati dicevano, e forse pensavano, di combattere per il Cristianesimo. Ma poiché sappiamo ciò che i Crociati intendevano meglio di loro stessi, non riesco proprio a capire perché non godiamo della medesima preziosa onniscienza riguardo agli americani. Anzi non vedo perché non dovremmo goderne (perché sarebbe assai piacevole) riguardo a qualsiasi singolo americano. Certamente fu questo vago spirito vagabondo a muovere il signor Pound non solo a venire in Inghilterra, ma in un certo senso a venire a Fleet Street. Una fosca tendenza tribale, vasta e invisibile come il vento, portò lui e il suo articolo come una foglia d’autunno a posarsi sulla soglia del New Age. Oppure un cieco impulso primordiale, del tutto privo di motivo razionale, lo condusse un giorno a mettersi il cappello, e a uscire col suo articolo in una busta e a imbucarlo in una cassetta postale. È vano correggere con fredda logica la potenza di simili appetiti primitivi; la Natura stessa era dietro la sconsideratezza apparentemente casuale del gesto. E ora che è irrevocabilmente compiuto, egli può volgersi a guardarlo e tracciare le grandi linee di una spaventosa legge delle medie; per cui è governato da una spietata necessità che un certo numero di tali americani debba scrivere un certo numero di tali articoli, come cadono le foglie o ritornano i fiori.
In plain words, this sort of theory is a blasphemy against the intellectual dignity of man. It is a blunder as well as a blasphemy; for it goes miles out of its way to find a bestial explanation when there is obviously a human explanation. It is as if a man told me that a dim survival of the instincts of a quadruped 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 grave disadvantages in sitting on a chair with one leg. Or it is as if I were told that I liked to swim in the sea, solely because some early forms 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 because the divine gift of reason tells me that it would be unsatisfactory to swim on the land. In short this sort of vague evolutionary theorising simply amounts to finding an unconvincing explanation of something that needs no explanation. And the case is really quite as simple with great political and religious movements by which man has from time to time changed the world in this or that respect in which he happened to think it would be the better for a change. The Crusade was a religious movement, but it was also a perfectly rational movement; one might almost say a rationalist movement. I could quite understand Mr. Pound saying that such a campaign for a creed was immoral; and indeed it often has been, and now perhaps generally is, quite horribly immoral. But when he implies that it is 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 fact that 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 modern conscript or professional soldier. He is more rational in his object, which is the intelligent and intelligible object of conversion; where the modern militarist has an object much more 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 even the 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 for this purpose, but the purpose itself is looser and more irrational. The object of all war is peace; but the object of religious war is mental as well as material peace; it is agreement. In short religious war aims ultimately at equality, where national war aims relatively at superiority. Conversion is the one sort of conquest in which the conquered must rejoice.
In that sense alone it is foolish for us in the West to sneer at those who kill men when a foot is set in a holy place, when we ourselves kill hundreds of thousands when a foot is put across a frontier. It is absurd for us to despise those who shed blood 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 only in its conception of ending the difference, but in its mere act of recognising the difference, as the deepest kind of difference. It is to reverse all reason to suggest that a man’s politics matter and his religion does not matter. It is to say he is affected by 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 walking under new lamp-posts, but not altered when he is another creature walking under strange stars. It is exactly as if we were to say that two people ought 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 included York it did not matter whether it was New York; or that so long as a man is in Essex we do not care whether he is in England.
Christendom would have been entirely justified in the abstract in being alarmed or suspicious at the mere rise of a great power that was not Christian. Nobody nowadays would think it odd to express regret at the rise of a power because it was Militarist or Socialist or even Protectionist. But it is far more natural to be conscious of a difference, not about the order of battle but the 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 foreigners but about the spiritual divisions even between us and friends. These are the things that differ profoundly with differing views of the ultimate nature of the universe. For the things of our country are 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 dared to christen as the love that makes the world go round. For this is the great paradox of life; that there are not only wheels within wheels, but the larger wheels within the smaller. When a whole community rests on one conception of life and death and the origin of things, it is quite entitled to watch the rise of another community founded on another conception as the rise of 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.
In parole chiare, questo genere di teoria è una bestemmia contro la dignità intellettuale dell’uomo. È un errore non meno che una bestemmia; poiché va miglia fuori strada per trovare una spiegazione bestiale quando c’è ovviamente una spiegazione umana. È come se un uomo mi dicesse che una fosca sopravvivenza degli istinti di un quadrupede era la ragione del mio sedermi su una sedia a quattro gambe. Rispondo che lo faccio perché prevedo che possano esserci gravi svantaggi nel sedersi su una sedia a una gamba sola. Oppure è come se mi si dicesse che amo nuotare nel mare unicamente perché qualche forma primordiale di vita anfibia uscì dal mare sulla riva. Rispondo che so perché nuoto nel mare; ed è perché il divino dono della ragione mi dice che sarebbe insoddisfacente nuotare sulla terraferma. In breve, questo genere di vago teorizzare evoluzionistico si riduce semplicemente a trovare una spiegazione poco convincente di qualcosa che non ha bisogno di spiegazione. E il caso è davvero altrettanto semplice per i grandi movimenti politici e religiosi con cui l’uomo ha di tempo in tempo mutato il mondo in questo o quel rispetto in cui gli capitava di pensare che sarebbe stato meglio un cambiamento. La Crociata fu un movimento religioso, ma fu anche un movimento perfettamente razionale; si potrebbe quasi dire un movimento razionalista. Potrei benissimo capire il signor Pound se dicesse che una tale campagna per un credo era immorale; e in effetti lo è stata spesso, e ora forse generalmente lo è, in modo assai orribile. Ma quando egli lascia intendere che essa è irrazionale, ha scelto esattamente la cosa che essa non è.
Non è l’illuminismo, al contrario è l’ignoranza e l’insularità, a far mancare ai più di noi questo fatto. Ma è certamente un fatto che la guerra religiosa è in sé stessa assai più razionale della guerra patriottica. Io per primo ho spesso difeso e persino incoraggiato la guerra patriottica, e sarei sempre pronto a difendere e incoraggiare la passione patriottica. Ma non si può negare che vi è più mera passione, mera preferenza e pregiudizio, in breve mero accidente personale, nel combattere un’altra nazione che nel combattere un’altra Fede. Il Crociato è in ogni senso più razionale del coscritto o del soldato professionista moderno. È più razionale nel suo oggetto, che è l’intelligente e intelligibile oggetto della conversione; laddove il militarista moderno ha un oggetto assai più confuso da una momentanea vanità e da una soddisfazione unilaterale. Il Crociato voleva fare di Gerusalemme una città cristiana; ma l’inglese non vuole fare di Berlino una città inglese. Ne ha soltanto un sano odio in quanto città prussiana. Il Musulmano voleva fare del cristiano un musulmano; ma persino il prussiano non voleva fare del francese un prussiano. Voleva soltanto far sì che il francese ammirasse un prussiano; e non solo i mezzi che adottò furono alquanto malaccorti a tale scopo, ma lo scopo stesso è più fiacco e più irrazionale. L’oggetto di ogni guerra è la pace; ma l’oggetto della guerra religiosa è la pace mentale non meno che materiale; è l’accordo. In breve, la guerra religiosa mira in ultima analisi all’uguaglianza, laddove la guerra nazionale mira relativamente alla superiorità. La conversione è l’unico tipo di conquista in cui il conquistato deve rallegrarsi.
In quel senso soltanto è sciocco per noi in Occidente schernire coloro che uccidono uomini quando un piede è posto in un luogo santo, mentre noi stessi ne uccidiamo centinaia di migliaia quando un piede è posto oltre una frontiera. È assurdo per noi disprezzare coloro che versano sangue per una reliquia quando noi abbiamo versato fiumi di sangue per uno straccio. Ma soprattutto la Crociata, o, se è per questo, la Jehad, è di gran lunga la più filosofica specie di combattimento, non solo nella sua concezione di porre fine alla differenza, ma nel suo mero atto di riconoscere la differenza, come la più profonda specie di differenza. È rovesciare ogni ragione suggerire che la politica di un uomo conti e la sua religione non conti. È dire che egli è influenzato dalla città in cui vive, ma non dal mondo in cui vive. È dire che egli è mutato quando è un concittadino che cammina sotto nuovi lampioni, ma non mutato quando è un’altra creatura che cammina sotto strane stelle. È esattamente come se dicessimo che due persone devono vivere nella stessa casa, ma non è necessario che sia nella stessa città. È esattamente come se dicessimo che, purché l’indirizzo includa York, non importa se si tratta di New York; o che, purché un uomo sia nell’Essex, non c’importa se sia in Inghilterra.
La cristianità sarebbe stata del tutto giustificata in astratto nell’allarmarsi o insospettirsi al solo sorgere di una grande potenza che non fosse cristiana. Nessuno oggigiorno troverebbe strano esprimere rammarico per il sorgere di una potenza perché militarista o socialista o persino protezionista. Ma è assai più naturale essere consapevoli di una differenza, non riguardo all’ordine di battaglia bensì alla battaglia della vita; non riguardo al nostro definibile godimento dei possessi, ma al nostro assai più dubbio possesso del godimento; non riguardo alle divisioni fiscali tra noi e gli stranieri, ma alle divisioni spirituali persino tra noi e gli amici. Queste sono le cose che differiscono profondamente col differire delle vedute sull’ultima natura dell’universo. Poiché le cose della nostra patria sono spesso lontane; ma le cose del nostro cosmo sono sempre vicine; possiamo chiudere le nostre porte al traffico su ruote della nostra città natale; ma nella nostra più intima stanza udiamo il suono che mai cessa; quella ruota che Dante e un proverbio popolare hanno osato battezzare come l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. Poiché questo è il grande paradosso della vita; che non vi sono solo ruote dentro le ruote, ma le ruote più grandi dentro quelle più piccole. Quando un’intera comunità si fonda su una sola concezione della vita e della morte e dell’origine delle cose, essa è pienamente autorizzata a osservare il sorgere di un’altra comunità fondata su un’altra concezione come il sorgere di qualcosa di certamente diverso e verosimilmente ostile. Anzi, come ho fatto notare a proposito di certe teorie politiche, noi già ammettiamo questa verità nei suoi esempi piccoli e discutibili. Neghiamo soltanto gli esempi grandi e ovvi.
Christendom might quite reasonably have been alarmed if it had not been attacked. But as a matter of history it had been attacked. The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter of history he was already an old enemy. The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of 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 I have argued above, that a religious division must make a difference; it had already made a difference. The difference stared them in the face in the startling transformation of Roman Barbary and of Roman Spain. In short it was something which must happen in theory and which did happen in practice; all expectation suggested 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 division involved every principle of the science of thought; and the last developments followed out every principle of the science of war. The Crusade was the counter-attack. It was the defensive army taking the 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 wandering of an animal. But a man so intelligent would not have made a mistake so extraordinary but for another error which it is here very essential to consider. To suggest that men engaged, rightly or wrongly, in so logical a military and political operation were only migrating like birds or swarming like bees is as ridiculous as to say that the Prohibition campaign in America was only an animal reversion towards lapping as the dog lappeth, or Rowland Hill’s introduction of postage stamps an animal taste for licking as the cat licks. Why should we provide other people with a remote reason for their own 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 to the pompous and clumsy building of the scientific Germans on the Mount of Olives, because it substitutes in the same way a modern stupidity for the medieval simplicity. But just as the German Hospice after all 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 possibly have meant, as distinct from all that they have actually said. There is indeed one respect in which the case of the Crusade does differ very much from modern political cases like prohibition or the penny post. I do not refer to such incidental peculiarities as the fact that Prohibition could only have succeeded through the enormous power of modern plutocracy, or that even the convenience of the postage goes along with an extreme coercion by the police. It is a somewhat deeper difference that I mean; and it may possibly be what 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 much more intellectual and dignified; a riot. In order to understand this religious war we must class it, not so much with the wars of history as with the revolutions of history. As I shall try to show briefly on a later page, it not only had all the peculiar good and the peculiar evil 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 it was popular as tantamount to a confession that it was animal. In these days when papers and speeches are full of words like democracy and self-determination, anything really resembling the movement of a mass of angry men is regarded as no better than a stampede of bulls or a scurry of rats. The new sociologists call it the herd instinct, just as the old reactionaries called it the many-headed beast. But both agree in implying that it is hardly worth while to count how many head there are of such cattle. In face of such fashionable comparisons it will seem comparatively mild to talk of migration as it occurs among birds or insects. Nevertheless we may venture to state with some confidence that both the sociologists and the reactionaries are wrong. It does not follow that human beings become less than human because their ideas appeal to more and more of humanity. Nor can we deduce that men are 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 herd of bulls or a pack of wolves, any more than the crimes of a mob can be committed by a flock of sheep or a shoal of herrings. Birds have never been known to besiege and capture an empty cage of an aviary, on a point of principle, merely because it had kept a few other birds in captivity, as the mob besieged and captured the almost empty Bastille, merely because it was the fortress of a historic tyranny. And rats have never been known to die by thousands merely in order to visit a particular trap in which a particular rat had perished, as the poor peasants of the First Crusade died in thousands for a far-off sight of the Sepulchre or a fragment of the true cross. In this sense indeed the Crusade was not rationalistic, if the rat is the only rationalist. But it will seem more truly rational to point out that the inspiration of such a crowd is not in such instincts as we share with the animals, but precisely in such ideas as the animals never (with all their virtues) understand.
La Cristianità avrebbe potuto con ragione allarmarsi se non fosse stata attaccata. Ma come fatto di storia era già stata attaccata. Il crociato sarebbe stato pienamente giustificato nel sospettare il mussulmano anche se questi fosse stato semplicemente uno straniero nuovo; ma come fatto di storia egli era già un vecchio nemico. Il critico della Crociata parla come se questa avesse cercato fuori qualche tribù o tempio inoffensivo nell’interno del Tibet, che non venne mai scoperto finché non fu invaso. Sembra dimentichino completamente che molto prima che i crociati avessero sognato di cavalcare fino a Gerusalemme, i mussulmani erano quasi arrivati a Parigi. Sembrano dimenticare che se i crociati conquistarono quasi la Palestina, fu solo un ritorno sui mussulmani che avevano quasi conquistato l’Europa. Non c’era bisogno che argomentassero facendo appello alla ragione, come ho fatto io sopra, che una divisione religiosa doveva fare la differenza; essa aveva già fatto la differenza. La differenza li fissava in volto nella sorprendente trasformazione della Barberia romana e della Spagna romana. In breve era qualcosa che doveva succedere in teoria e che è successo in pratica; ogni aspettativa suggeriva che sarebbe stato così ed ogni esperienza diceva che lo fosse. Avendo pensato la cosa teoricamente ed essendosene fatta l’esperienza praticamente, procedettero a trattarla altrettanto praticamente. La prima divisione coinvolgeva ogni principio della scienza del pensiero; e gli ultimi sviluppi seguivano ogni principio della scienza della guerra. La Crociata fu il contrattacco. Fu l’esercito difensivo che prendeva l’offensiva a sua volta, respingendo l’invasore alla sua base. Ed è questo processo, ragionevole dal suo primo assioma al suo ultimo atto, che Mr. Pound in realtà sceglie come una specie di vagabondaggio automatico di un animale. Ma un uomo così intelligente non avrebbe fatto uno sbaglio così straordinario se non fosse stato per un altro errore che qui è molto essenziale considerare. Suggerire che uomini impegnati, giustamente o ingiustamente, in una operazione militare e politica tanto logica stessero solo migrando come uccelli o formando uno sciame come api è altrettanto ridicolo che dire che la campagna del Proibizionismo in America fosse stata solo una regressione animale verso il leccarsi come fa un cane, o l’introduzione dei francobolli da Rowland Hill un gusto animale per il leccarsi come fa un gatto. Perché dovremmo fornire agli altri una ragione remota delle loro azioni quando essi stessi sono pronti a dircene la ragione, e questa è una ragione perfettamente ragionevole?
Ho paragonato questa pomposa impostura della storia scientifica al pomposo e goffo edificio dei tedeschi scientifici sul Monte degli Ulivi, perché sostituisce allo stesso modo una stupidità moderna alla semplicità medievale. Ma proprio come l’Ospizio Tedesco in fin dei conti si trova su un sito magnifico e avrebbe potuto essere un edificio magnifico, così c’è pure un’altra verità, abbastanza analoga, che gli storici tedeschi delle Migrationsvölker forse intendevano dire, a parte tutto quello che hanno effettivamente detto. C’è infatti un aspetto in cui il caso della Crociata si differenzia molto dai casi politici moderni come la proibizione o l’affrancatura postale di un penny. Non mi riferisco a peculiarità occasionali, come il fatto che la Proibizione avrebbe potuto avere successo solo grazie all’enorme potere della plutocrazia moderna, o che anche la comodità del servizio postale va di pari passo con una coercizione estrema da parte della polizia. È una differenza un po’ più profonda quella a cui mi riferisco; e forse è quello che intendono questi critici. Ma la differenza non sta nello spirito evolutivo, bensì piuttosto in quello rivoluzionario.
La Prima Crociata non fu una migrazione razziale; fu qualcosa di assai più intellettuale e dignitoso: una sommossa. Per comprendere questa guerra religiosa dobbiamo classificarla non tanto con le guerre della storia quanto con le rivoluzioni della storia. Come tenterò di mostrare brevemente in una pagina successiva, essa non solo ebbe tutto il bene peculiare e il male peculiare di cose come la Rivoluzione francese o la Rivoluzione russa, ma fu una rivoluzione più puramente popolare di entrambe. La mente davvero moderna considererà naturalmente l’affermazione che essa fu popolare come equivalente a una confessione che essa fu animale. In questi giorni in cui i giornali e i discorsi sono pieni di parole come democrazia e autodeterminazione, tutto ciò che assomigli davvero al movimento di una massa di uomini adirati è considerato non meglio di una fuga precipitosa di tori o di uno scompiglio di topi. I nuovi sociologi lo chiamano istinto del gregge, proprio come i vecchi reazionari lo chiamavano la bestia dalle molte teste. Ma entrambi concordano nell’implicare che difficilmente valga la pena di contare quante teste vi siano di simile bestiame. Di fronte a tali paragoni alla moda sembrerà relativamente mite parlare di migrazione quale avviene fra gli uccelli o gli insetti. Nondimeno possiamo azzardarci a dichiarare con una certa fiducia che sia i sociologi sia i reazionari hanno torto. Non ne segue che gli esseri umani divengano meno che umani perché le loro idee fanno appello a una parte sempre maggiore dell’umanità. Né possiamo dedurre che gli uomini siano privi di mente solo dal fatto che sono tutti di una sola mente. In semplice verità, le virtù di una folla non si possono trovare in un branco di tori o in un branco di lupi, non più di quanto i delitti di una folla possano essere commessi da un gregge di pecore o da un banco di aringhe. Gli uccelli non si sono mai visti assediare e catturare una gabbia vuota di una voliera, per una questione di principio, solo perché aveva tenuto prigionieri alcuni altri uccelli, come la folla assediò e catturò la Bastiglia quasi vuota, solo perché era la fortezza di una tirannia storica. E non si sono mai visti topi morire a migliaia solo per visitare una particolare trappola in cui un particolare topo era perito, come i poveri contadini della Prima Crociata morirono a migliaia per una lontana visione del Sepolcro o per un frammento della vera Croce. In questo senso invero la Crociata non fu razionalistica, se il topo è l’unico razionalista. Ma sembrerà più veramente razionale far notare che l’ispirazione di una simile folla non sta in tali istinti quali condividiamo con gli animali, ma precisamente in tali idee quali gli animali non comprendono mai (con tutte le loro virtù).
What is peculiar about the First Crusade is that it was in quite a new and abnormal sense a popular movement. I might almost say it was the only popular movement there ever was in the world. For it was not a thing which the populace followed; it was actually a thing which the populace led. It was not only essentially a revolution, but it was the only revolution I know of in which the masses began by acting alone, and practically without any support from any of the classes. When they had acted, the classes came 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 certain ideas were first suggested by a few philosophers, and then preached by demagogues to the democracy. This was to a great extent true of the French Revolution; it was probably yet more true of the Russian Revolution; and we need not here pause upon the fine shade of 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 or private prayers, as if he had come out to fight with his own domestic poker or private carving-knife. He was not armed with new weapons of 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 Aquinas but Peter the Hermit, who can hardly be called even a popular leader, but rather a popular flag. And it was his army, or rather his enormous rabble, that first marched across the world to die for the deliverance of Jerusalem.
Historians say that in that huge host of thousands there were only nine knights. To any one who knows even a little of medieval war the fact seems astounding. It is indeed a long exploded fallacy 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 Ages was almost entirely feudal; indeed we might rather say that feudalism was the name of their military organisation. That so vast a military mass should have attempted to move at all, with only nine of the natural military 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 Moslems and was massacred; or, might I so mystically express it, martyred. Many of the great kings and knights who followed in their tracks did not so clearly deserve any haloes for the simplicity and purity of their motives. The canonisation of such a crowd might be impossible, and would certainly be resisted in modern opinion; chiefly because they indulged their democratic violence on the way by killing various usurers; a course which naturally fills modern society with an anger verging on alarm. A perversity leads me to weep rather more over the many slaughtered 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 had a common creed, was aroused, and a new army followed of a very different type of skill and training; led by most of the ablest captains and by some of the most chivalrous gentlemen of the age. For curiously enough, the host contained more than one cultured gentleman who was as simple a Christian as any peasant, and as recklessly ready to be butchered or tortured for the mere name of Christ.
It is a tag of the materialists that the truth about history rubs away the romance of history. It is dear to the modern mind because 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 modern man 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 much more like a knight of the Round Table. In fact he was a far better man than most of the knights of the Round Table, in whose characters the fabulist, knowing that he was writing a fable, was tactful enough to introduce a larger admixture of vice. Truth is not 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 those admirable accidents which are generally and perhaps rightly regarded as 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 magnanimity of knighthood. Everything about him suggests it; from his first conversion from the imperial to the papal (and popular) cause, to his great refusal of the kinghood of the city he had taken; “I will not 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 plainest public spirit. But even if we dismiss all that was written of him by Christian chroniclers because they might be his friends (which would be a pathetic and exaggerated compliment to the harmonious unity of Crusaders and of Christians) he would still remain sufficiently 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.
Ciò che è peculiare della Prima Crociata è che essa fu, in un senso del tutto nuovo e anormale, un movimento popolare. Potrei quasi dire che fu l’unico movimento popolare che vi sia mai stato al mondo. Poiché non fu una cosa che il popolo seguì; fu in realtà una cosa che il popolo guidò. Non solo fu essenzialmente una rivoluzione, ma fu l’unica rivoluzione che io conosca in cui le masse cominciarono ad agire da sole, e praticamente senza alcun sostegno da parte di nessuna delle classi. Quando ebbero agito, le classi entrarono in scena; ed è perfettamente vero, e anzi solo naturale, che le masse da sole fallirono là dove le due insieme riuscirono. Ma furono gli incolti a educare i colti. Il caso della Crociata non è affatto un caso in cui certe idee furono prima suggerite da pochi filosofi, e poi predicate da demagoghi alla democrazia. Ciò fu in gran misura vero della Rivoluzione francese; fu probabilmente ancor più vero della Rivoluzione russa; e non occorre qui soffermarsi sulla sottile sfumatura di differenza per cui Rousseau aveva ragione e Karl Marx aveva torto. Nella Prima Crociata fu l’uomo comune ad avere ragione o torto. Egli uscì furente all’insulto alle sue proprie piccole immagini o alle sue private preghiere, come se fosse uscito a combattere col proprio attizzatoio domestico o col proprio coltello da trinciare privato. Non era armato di nuove armi di arguzia e di logica servite dall’arsenale di un’accademia. C’era ogni quantità di arguzia e di logica nelle accademie del Medioevo; ma il tipico capo della Crociata non fu Abelardo o Aquino, bensì Pietro l’Eremita, che difficilmente può essere chiamato persino un capo popolare, ma piuttosto una bandiera popolare. E fu il suo esercito, o piuttosto la sua enorme marmaglia, a marciare per primo attraverso il mondo per morire per la liberazione di Gerusalemme.
Gli storici dicono che in quell’immensa schiera di migliaia c’erano solo nove cavalieri. A chiunque conosca anche solo un poco della guerra medievale il fatto sembra sbalorditivo. È invero una fallacia da lungo tempo screditata considerare il medievalismo come identico al feudalesimo. C’erano innumerevoli istituzioni democratiche, come le corporazioni; talora anche venti corporazioni in una sola piccola città. Ma è davvero vero che l’organizzazione militare del Medioevo era quasi interamente feudale; anzi potremmo piuttosto dire che il feudalesimo era il nome della loro organizzazione militare. Che una massa militare così vasta abbia tentato di muoversi affatto, con soli nove dei naturali capi militari, mi sembra un prodigio di iniziativa popolare. È come se un parlamento fosse eletto alle prossime elezioni generali, in cui solo due uomini potessero permettersi di leggere un quotidiano.
Questa folla marciò contro la disciplina militare dei Musulmani e fu massacrata; o, potrei esprimerlo così misticamente, martirizzata. Molti dei grandi re e cavalieri che seguirono le loro tracce non meritarono così chiaramente alcuna aureola per la semplicità e la purezza dei loro moventi. La canonizzazione di una simile folla sarebbe forse impossibile, e certamente incontrerebbe resistenza nell’opinione moderna; principalmente perché essi assecondarono la loro violenza democratica lungo il cammino uccidendo vari usurai; una linea di condotta che naturalmente riempie la società moderna di una collera che rasenta l’allarme. Una perversità mi induce a piangere piuttosto più sui molti contadini trucidati che sui pochi usurai trucidati; ma in ogni caso i contadini certamente non furono trucidati invano. La comune coscienza di tutte le classi, in un tempo in cui tutte avevano un credo comune, fu ridestata, e seguì un nuovo esercito di un tipo assai diverso di abilità e di addestramento; guidato dai più valenti capitani e da alcuni dei più cavallereschi gentiluomini dell’epoca. Poiché, per quanto strano, la schiera conteneva più di un colto gentiluomo che era cristiano tanto semplice quanto qualsiasi contadino, e pronto tanto temerariamente a farsi macellare o torturare per il solo nome di Cristo.
È un ritornello dei materialisti che la verità sulla storia cancelli lo Romanzo della storia. È caro alla mente moderna perché è deprimente; ma si dà il caso che non sia vero. Nulla emerge più chiaramente da uno studio che sia davvero realistico del curioso fatto che le persone romantiche erano davvero romantiche. Sono piuttosto i romanzi storici a indurre l’uomo moderno ad aspettarsi vagamente di trovare il capo dei nuovi cavalieri, Goffredo di Buglione, essere stato semplicemente un brutale barone. I fatti storici sono tutti a favore del fatto che egli fu assai più simile a un cavaliere della Tavola Rotonda. Anzi, egli fu un uomo assai migliore della maggior parte dei cavalieri della Tavola Rotonda, nei cui caratteri il favolista, sapendo di scrivere una Favola, ebbe il tatto di introdurre una maggiore mescolanza di vizio. La Verità non è solo più strana della finzione, ma spesso più santa della finzione. Poiché la verità è reale, mentre la finzione è costretta a essere realistica. Per quanto strano, Goffredo sembra essere stato eroico persino in quegli ammirevoli accidenti che sono generalmente e forse giustamente considerati gli orpelli della finzione. Così egli era di statura eroica, un bell’uomo dalla barba rossa, di grande forza e ardimento personale; e fu lui stesso il primo uomo a scavalcare le mura di Gerusalemme, come qualsiasi ragazzo eroe in una storia d’avventure per ragazzi. Ma era anche, il realista sarà sorpreso di udirlo, un uomo perfettamente onesto, e un praticante perfettamente genuino della teorica magnanimità della cavalleria. Tutto in lui lo suggerisce; dalla sua prima conversione dalla causa imperiale a quella papale (e popolare), fino al suo grande rifiuto della regalità della città che aveva preso: «Non porterò una corona d’oro là dove il mio Signore portò una corona di spine». Fu un giusto sovrano, e le leggi che fece erano piene del più schietto spirito pubblico. Ma anche se scartassimo tutto ciò che fu scritto di lui dai cronisti cristiani perché potrebbero essere suoi amici (il che sarebbe un patetico ed esagerato complimento all’armoniosa unità dei Crociati e dei Cristiani), egli rimarrebbe ancora sufficientemente assolto e incoronato dalle parole dei suoi nemici. Poiché un cronista saraceno scrisse di lui, con una bella semplicità, che se ogni verità e onore fossero altrimenti appassiti dalla terra, ne rimarrebbe ancora abbastanza finché il Duca Goffredo fosse vivo.
Allied with Godfrey were Tancred the Italian, Raymond of Toulouse with the southern French and Robert of Normandy, the adventurous son of the Conqueror, with the Normans and the English. But it would be an error, I think, and one tending to make the whole subsequent story a thing not so much misunderstood as unintelligible, to suppose that the whole crusading movement had been suddenly and unnaturally stiffened with the highest chivalric discipline. Unless I am much mistaken, a great mass of that army was 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 and wail together, the importance of the demagogue, Peter the Hermit, in spite of his unmilitary character, and the wide differences between the designs of the leaders and the actions of the rank and file. It was a crowd of rude and simple men that cast themselves on the sacred dust at the first sight of the little mountain town 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 sea of Islam. Meanwhile Godfrey came up the road from Jaffa, and crossing the mountain ridge, saw also with his living eyes his vision of the world’s desire. But the poorest men about him probably 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 from the Northern villages, who had never dreamed in nightmares of such landscapes or such a sun, who knew not how men lived at all in such a 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 rotted along their road; they arrived shrivelled to rags or already raving with fever and they did what they had come to do.
Above all, it is clear that they had the vices as well as the virtues of a mob. The shocking massacre in which they indulged in the sudden relaxation of success is quite obviously a massacre by a mob. It is all the more profoundly revolutionary because it must have been for the most part a French mob. It was of the same order as the Massacre of September, and it is but a part of the same truth that 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, directed against what was also regarded as an anti-national aristocracy. It is practically self-evident that the Christian commanders were opposed to it, and tried to stop it. Tancred promised their lives to 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 loose and raging in the streets of the Holy City. And in nothing do we see that spirit of revolution more clearly than in the sight of all those peasants and serfs and vassals, in that one wild moment 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 even horrible excitement. Those who tell us to-day about the psychology of the crowd will agree that men who have so suffered and so succeeded are not normal; that their brains are in a dreadful balance which may turn either way. They entered the city at last in a mood in which they might all have become monks; and instead they all became murderers. A brilliant general, who played a decisive part in our own recent Palestinian campaign, told me with a sort of grim humour that he hardly wondered at the story; for he himself had entered Jerusalem in a sort of 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 that hangs over our human nature, making it enter the Holy City as if it were the Heavenly City, and more than any earthly city can be. But the struggle which led to the scaling of Jerusalem in the First Crusade was something much wilder and more incalculable than anything that can be conceived in modern war. We can hardly wonder that the crusading crowd saw the town in front of them as a sort of tower full of demons, and the hills around them as an enchanted and 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 what could be done on their own side; every movement against them was a stab out of the darkness and every movement they made was a leap in the dark. First, on the one side, we have Tancred trying to take the whole fortified city by climbing up a single slender ladder, as if a man tried to lasso the peak of a mountain. Then we have the flinging from the turrets of a strange and 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 have seemed the flaming oil of witchcraft. Then Godfrey and the wiser of the warriors set about to build wooden siege-towers and found they had next to no wood to build them. There was scarcely anything in that rocky waste but the dwarf trees of olive; a poetic fantasy woven about that war in after ages described them as hindered even in their wood-cutting by the demons of that weird place. And indeed the fancy had an essential truth, for the very nature of 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 touch with 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 dragged them heavily against the high towers of the city. The catapults of the city answered them, the cataracts of devouring fire came down; the wooden towers swayed and tottered, and two of them suddenly stuck motionless and useless. And as the darkness fell a great flare must have told them that the third and last was in flames.
Alleati di Goffredo erano Tancredi l’Italiano, Raimondo di Tolosa con i Francesi meridionali e Roberto di Normandia, l’avventuroso figlio del Conquistatore, con i Normanni e gli Inglesi. Ma sarebbe un errore, credo, e tale da rendere l’intera storia successiva non tanto fraintesa quanto inintelligibile, supporre che l’intero movimento crociato si fosse d’un tratto e innaturalmente irrigidito nella più alta disciplina cavalleresca. Se non m’inganno di molto, gran parte di quell’esercito era ancora in larga misura una folla. È probabile a priori, giacché il grande movimento popolare era ancora profondamente popolare. Lo confermano mille cose nella vicenda della campagna: lo straordinario emozionalismo che faceva piangere e gemere insieme moltitudini di uomini, l’importanza del demagogo, Pietro l’Eremita, malgrado il suo carattere per nulla militare, e le ampie differenze tra i disegni dei capi e le azioni della truppa. Fu una folla di uomini rozzi e semplici a gettarsi sulla sacra polvere alla prima vista della piccola città di montagna che avevano marciato per duemila miglia per vedere. Tancredi la vide per primo dal pendio presso il villaggio di Betlemme, che aveva aperto volentieri le sue porte ai suoi cento cavalieri italiani; poiché Betlemme allora come oggi era un’isola di Cristianità nel mare dell’Islam. Intanto Goffredo saliva per la strada da Giaffa e, valicando il crinale montano, vide anch’egli con i propri occhi vivi la sua visione del desiderio del mondo. Ma i più poveri tra gli uomini intorno a lui provavano probabilmente ciò che provava lui; tutti i ranghi s’inginocchiarono insieme nella polvere, e l’intera storia è un’unica ondata di uomini innumerevoli e senza nome. Era una folla che si era levata come un solo uomo per la fede. Era una folla che era stata veramente torturata come un solo uomo per la fede. Era già trasfigurata dal dolore non meno che dalla passione. Chi conosce la guerra in quei deserti nei mesi estivi, anche con moderni rifornimenti e apparecchiature e moderne mappe e calcoli, sa che essa potrebbe descriversi solo come un inferno pieno di eroi. Cosa dev’essere stata per quei piccoli servi e contadini locali dei villaggi del Nord, che mai avevano sognato neppure negli incubi simili paesaggi o un simile sole, che non sapevano affatto come gli uomini potessero vivere in una tale fornace e non potevano né immaginarne i sollievi né procurarseli, è al di là dell’immaginazione dell’uomo. Arrivarono morenti di sete, stremati di stanchezza, piangendo la perdita dei morti che marcivano lungo la loro strada; arrivarono ridotti a stracci raggrinziti o già deliranti per la febbre, e fecero ciò che erano venuti a fare.
Soprattutto è chiaro che avevano i vizi così come le virtù di una folla. La scioccante strage nella quale si abbandonarono nel rilassamento improvviso del successo è chiaramente una strage da folla. È ancor più profondamente rivoluzionaria perché deve essere stata per la maggior parte opera di una folla francese. Era dello stesso ordine della Strage di Settembre, e fa parte della stessa verità che la Prima Crociata fu tanto rivoluzionaria quanto la Rivoluzione Francese. Era dello stesso ordine della Strage di San Bartolomeo, che era anch’essa un puro fanatismo popolare, diretto contro ciò che veniva considerato come una aristocrazia antinazionale. È praticamente auto-evidente che i comandanti cristiani vi si opposero e cercarono di fermarla. Tancredi promise la vita ai musulmani nella moschea, ma la folla chiaramente lo ignorò. Raimondo di Tolosa stesso salvò coloro nel Torrione di Davide, e riuscì a mandarli in salvo con i loro beni ad Ascalona. Ma la rivoluzione col suo male così come il suo bene era scatenata e infuriava nelle strade della Santa Città. E non vediamo quello spirito di rivoluzione più chiaramente che nella vista di tutti quei contadini e servi e vassalli, in quel momento selvaggio, in rivolta non solo contro i signori conquistati dell’Islam, ma anche contro i signori conquistatori della Cristianità.
L’intera tensione dell’assedio era stata invero di alta e persino orribile eccitazione. Coloro che oggi ci parlano della psicologia della folla converranno che uomini che hanno tanto sofferto e tanto trionfato non sono normali; che i loro cervelli sono in un equilibrio spaventoso che può volgere in un senso o nell’altro. Entrarono infine nella città in uno stato d’animo in cui avrebbero potuto tutti farsi monaci; e invece si fecero tutti assassini. Un brillante generale, che ebbe una parte decisiva nella nostra recente campagna di Palestina, mi disse con una sorta di tetro umorismo che quasi non si stupiva della storia; poiché egli stesso era entrato a Gerusalemme in una sorta di furia di delusione: «Attraversammo un tale inferno per arrivarci, e ora è rovinato per tutti noi.» Tale è la pesante ironia che grava sulla nostra natura umana, facendole entrare nella Santa Città come se fosse la Città Celeste, e più di quanto qualsiasi città terrena possa essere. Ma la lotta che condusse alla scalata di Gerusalemme nella Prima Crociata fu qualcosa di assai più selvaggio e incalcolabile di qualunque cosa si possa concepire nella guerra moderna. Difficilmente possiamo meravigliarci che la folla crociata vedesse la città davanti a sé come una sorta di torre piena di demoni, e le colline intorno come una terra incantata e maledetta. Poiché in un senso molto reale lo era davvero; giacché tutti gli elementi e gli espedienti erano parimenti quantità ignote. Tutti i metodi dei loro nemici erano segreti scagliati loro addosso. Tutti i loro metodi erano cose nuove fatte dal nulla. Si domandavano del pari cosa sarebbe stato fatto dall’altra parte e cosa potesse esser fatto dalla propria; ogni mossa contro di loro era una pugnalata dalle tenebre e ogni mossa che facevano era un salto nel buio. Dapprima, da un lato, abbiamo Tancredi che tenta di prendere l’intera città fortificata arrampicandosi su un’unica sottile scala, come se un uomo tentasse di prendere al laccio la vetta di una montagna. Poi abbiamo il lancio dalle torri di una strana e terribile pioggia di fuoco, come se l’acqua stessa avesse preso fuoco. Fu poi conosciuto come il Fuoco Greco ed era probabilmente petrolio; ma a coloro che non l’avevano mai visto (né sentito) prima poté ben sembrare l’olio fiammeggiante della stregoneria. Poi Goffredo e i più saggi tra i guerrieri si misero a costruire torri d’assedio di legno e scoprirono di non avere quasi legname per costruirle. Non c’era quasi nulla in quella pietrosa desolazione se non gli alberi nani d’ulivo; una fantasia poetica intessuta intorno a quella guerra in epoche successive li descrisse come ostacolati perfino nel taglio della legna dai demoni di quel luogo stregato. E in verità l’immaginazione conteneva una verità essenziale, poiché la natura stessa della terra combatteva contro di loro; e ciascuno di quegli alberi nani, duri e cavi e contorti, poteva ben sembrare un folletto ghignante. Si dice che trovassero travi per caso in una caverna; abbatterono le travi da case in rovina; alla fine entrarono in contatto con alcuni artigiani di Genova che si misero all’opera con maggior successo, scuoiando il bestiame, morto a mucchi, e rivestendo le travi. Costruirono tre alte torri su rulli, e uomini e bestie le trascinarono pesantemente contro le alte torri della città. Le catapulte della città risposero loro, le cateratte di fuoco divorante scesero giù; le torri di legno oscillarono e vacillarono, e due di esse d’un tratto si bloccarono immobili e inutili. E al calar delle tenebre un grande bagliore dovette annunciare loro che la terza e ultima era in fiamme.
All that night Godfrey was toiling to retrieve the disaster. He took down the whole tower from where it stood and raised it again on the high ground to the north of the city which is now marked by the pine tree that grows outside Herod’s gate. And all the time he toiled, it was said, sinister sorcerers sat upon the battlements, working unknown marvels for the undoing of the labour of man. If the great knight had a touch of such symbolism on his own side, he might have seen in his own strife with the solid timber something of the craft that had surrounded the birth of his creed, and the sacred trade of the carpenter. And indeed the very pattern of all carpentry is cruciform, and there is something more than an accident in the allegory. The transverse position of the timber does indeed involve many of those mathematical that are analogous to moral truths and almost every structural shape has the shadow of the mystic rood, as the three dimensions have a shadow of the Trinity. Here is the true mystery of equality; since the longer beam might lengthen itself to infinity, and never be nearer to the symbolic shape without the help of the shorter. Here is that war and wedding between two contrary forces, resisting and supporting 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 circle of Asia. It may be improbable, though it is far from impossible (for the age was philosophical enough) that a man like Godfrey thus extended the mystical to the metaphysical; but the writer of a real romance about him would be well within his rights in making him see the symbolism of his own tower, a tower rising above him through the clouds of night as if taking hold on the heaven or 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 sign of the cross.
When dawn was come all those starving peasants may well have stood before the high impregnable walls in the broad daylight of despair. Even their nightmares during the night, of unearthly necromancers looking down at them from the battlements and with signs and spells paralysing all their potential toils, may well have been a sort of pessimistic consolation, anticipating and accounting for failure. The Holy City had become for them a fortress full of fiends, when Godfrey de Bouillon again set himself sword in hand upon the wooden tower and gave the order once more to drag it tottering towards the towers on either side of the postern gate. So they crawled again across the fosse full 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 in the mire, and from the engines of the Greek Fire all the torrents of their torment came down on them like red rivers of hell. For indeed the souls of those peasants must have been sickened with something of the topsy-turvydom felt by too many peasants of our own 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 may have mingled with the dust of battle, and darkened such light as showed where shattering rocks were rending a roof of shields, to men bowed and blinded as they are by such labour of dragging and such a hailstorm of death. They may have heard through all the racket of nameless noises the high minaret cries of 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 cloud of battle, the tower of timber and the tower of stone had touched and met in mid-heaven; and great Godfrey, alone and alive, had leapt upon the wall of Jerusalem.
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Tutta quella notte Godfrey si affannò per rimediare al disastro. Abbatté l’intera torre dal luogo dove sorgeva e la ricostruì sulle alture a nord della città, che oggi sono segnate dalla pianta di pino che cresce fuori dalle porte di Erode. E tutto il tempo in cui si affannò, si diceva che sinistri maghi sedessero sui merli, operando ignote meraviglie per disfare il lavoro dell’uomo. Se il grande cavaliere avesse avuto un barlume di tale simbolismo dalla sua parte, avrebbe potuto vedere nella propria lotta con la solida trave qualcosa del mestiere che aveva circondato la nascita della sua fede e il sacro lavoro del carpentiere. E in effetti lo stesso schema di tutta la carpenteria è a forma di croce, e c’è più di un caso nell’allegoria. La posizione trasversale della trave implica infatti molte di quelle verità matematiche che sono analoghe alle verità morali e quasi ogni struttura ha l’ombra della mistica croce, come le tre dimensioni hanno un’ombra della Trinità. Ecco il vero mistero dell’uguaglianza; poiché la trave più lunga potrebbe allungarsi fino all’infinito e non avvicinarsi mai alla forma simbolica senza l’aiuto della più corta. Ecco quella guerra e quel matrimonio tra due forze opposte, che si resistono e si sostengono a vicenda; il luogo d’incontro dei contrari che noi, con una sorta di pietistico gioco di parole, chiamiamo ancora la croce della questione. Ecco la nostra angolare e provocatoria risposta al se-devorante cerchio dell’Asia. Può essere improbabile, sebbene sia tutt’altro che impossibile (perché quell’epoca era abbastanza filosofica) che un uomo come Godfrey abbia così esteso il mistico al metafisico; ma lo scrittore di una vera romanzo su di lui sarebbe bene nei suoi diritti nel farlo vedere il simbolismo della sua torre, una torre che si ergeva sopra di lui attraverso le nuvole della notte come se volesse afferrare il cielo o mostrare la sua rete di travi nera contro l’alba; che scalava i cieli ed era aperta a tutti i venti, una scala e un labirinto, ripetendo fino a perdersi nel crepuscolo lo schema del segno della croce.
Quando l’alba fu giunta, tutti quei contadini affamati poterono ben trovarsi davanti agli alti muri inespugnabili nella piena luce della disperazione. Perfino i loro incubi durante la notte, di ultraterreni negromanti che li guardavano dall’alto dei bastioni e con segni e incantesimi paralizzavano ogni loro potenziale fatica, poterono ben essere una sorta di consolazione pessimistica, che anticipava e spiegava il fallimento. La Santa Città era divenuta per loro una fortezza piena di demoni, quando Goffredo di Buglione di nuovo si pose, spada in pugno, sulla torre di legno e diede l’ordine ancora una volta di trascinarla vacillante verso le torri ai due lati della poterna. Così strisciarono di nuovo attraverso il fossato pieno degli uccisi, trascinandosi dietro la loro enorme casa di legname, e tutto il fragore e il frastuono della guerra ruppe di nuovo sopra le loro teste. Una gragnuola di dardi martellava gli scudi che li coprivano come un baldacchino, pietre e rocce cadevano su di loro e li schiacciavano come mosche nel fango, e dalle macchine del Fuoco Greco tutti i torrenti del loro tormento scesero su di loro come rossi fiumi d’inferno. Poiché in verità le anime di quei contadini devono essere state nauseate da qualcosa di quel capovolgimento provato da troppi contadini del nostro tempo sotto le spaventose batterie volanti della guerra scientifica; una bestemmia di battaglia rovesciata in cui l’inferno stesso ha occupato il cielo. Qualcosa dei vapori vomitati da tale crudele chimica può essersi mescolato alla polvere della battaglia, e aver oscurato quel poco di luce che mostrava dove le rocce dirompenti squarciavano un tetto di scudi, a uomini curvi e accecati come sono da tale fatica di trascinamento e da tale grandinata di morte. Possono aver udito attraverso tutto il frastuono di rumori senza nome le alte grida dal minareto del trionfo musulmano che si levavano più stridule come un vento in stridenti zampogne, e ben poco altro seppero di ciò che accadeva sopra o oltre loro. Era assai probabile che faticassero e lottassero in quella tenebra inferiore, senza sapere che alta sopra le loro teste, e su in alto oltre la nube della battaglia, la torre di legno e la torre di pietra si erano toccate e incontrate a mezzo cielo; e il grande Goffredo, solo e vivo, era balzato sul muro di Gerusalemme.
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CHAPTER XII
THE FALL OF CHIVALRY
On the back of this book is the name of the New Jerusalem and on the first page of it a phrase about the necessity of going back to the old even to find the new, as a man retraces his steps to a sign-post. The common sense of that process is indeed most mysteriously misunderstood. Any suggestion that progress has at any time taken the wrong turning is always answered by the argument that 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-trap by turning to the left by the red pillar-box, instead of to the right by the blue palings of the inn called the Rising Sun, my progressive guide always proceeds to soothe me by talking about the myth of an Age of Gold. He says I am idealising the right turning. He says the blue palings are not so blue as 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 blue was of solid sapphires, or the sun of solid gold. In short he assures me I am wrong in supposing that the right turning was right in every possible respect; as if I had ever supposed anything of the sort. I want to go back to that particular place, not because it was all my fancy paints it, or because it was the best place my fancy can paint; but because it was a many thousand times better place than 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 was the 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 to the wrong one.
Now it is quite true that there is less general human testimony to the notion of a New Jerusalem in the future than to the notion of a Golden Age in the past. But neither of those ideas, whether or no they are illusions, are any answer to the question of a plain man in the plain position of this parable; a man who has to find some guidance in the past if he is to get any good in the future. What he positively knows, in any case, is the complete collapse of the present. Now that is the exact truth about the thing so often rebuked as a romantic and unreal return of modern men to medieval things. They suppose they have taken the wrong turning, because they know they are in the wrong place. To know that, it is necessary not to idealise the medieval world, but merely to realise the modern world. It is not so much that they suppose the medieval world was above the 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 live in a New Jerusalem of pearl and sapphire in the future, or that a man was meant to live in a picturesque and richly-painted tavern of the past; but with a strong inward and personal persuasion that a man was not meant to live in a man-trap.
For there is and will be more and more a turn of total change in all our talk and writing about history. Everything in the past was praised if it had led up to the present, and blamed if it would have led up to anything else. In short everybody has been searching the past for the secret of our success. Very soon everybody may be searching the past for the secret of our failure. They may be talking in such terms as they use after a motor smash or a bankruptcy; where was the blunder? They may be writing such books as 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 something of the dignity of Babel or Babylon. Whether we call it the nemesis of Capitalism or the nightmare of Bolshevism makes no difference; the rich grumble as much as the poor; every one is discontented, and none more than those who are chiefly discontented with the discontent. About that discord we are in perfect harmony; about that disease we all think alike, whatever we think of the diagnosis or the cure. By whatever process in the past we might have come to the right place, practical facts in the present and future will prove 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 world to 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 road will 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 age was 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 which everything went wrong. It was the moment when things might have developed well, and did develop badly. Or rather, to be yet more exact, it was the moment when they were developing well, and yet they were driven to develop badly. This was the history of all the medieval states and of none more than medieval Jerusalem; indeed there were signs of some serious idea of making it the model medieval 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 more important part played by Jerusalem, I think, in all that great progress 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 that might have led to it. It is bound up with that quality of the civilisation 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.
CAPITOLO XII
LA CADUTA DELLA CAVALLERIA
Sul dorso di questo libro c’è il nome della Nuova Gerusalemme e sulla sua prima pagina una frase sulla necessità di tornare all’antico anche per trovare il nuovo, come un uomo ritorna sui propri passi fino a un cartello indicatore. Il buon senso di tale processo è invero frainteso nel modo più misterioso. Ogni suggerimento che il progresso abbia in un qualsiasi tempo preso la svolta sbagliata riceve sempre in risposta l’argomento che gli uomini idealizzano il passato e fanno un mito dell’Età dell’Oro. Se la mia guida progressista mi ha condotto in un pantano o in una trappola svoltando a sinistra presso la cassetta rossa delle lettere, invece che a destra presso lo steccato azzurro della locanda chiamata il Sole Nascente, la mia guida progressista procede sempre a rabbonirmi parlando del mito di un’Età dell’Oro. Dice che sto idealizzando la svolta giusta. Dice che lo steccato azzurro non è così azzurro come è dipinto. Dice che è azzurro solo per la distanza. Mi assicura che ci sono macchie sul sole, perfino sul sole nascente. Talvolta mi dice che ho torto nella mia salda convinzione che l’azzurro fosse di solidi zaffiri, o il sole d’oro massiccio. Insomma, mi assicura che ho torto nel supporre che la svolta giusta fosse giusta sotto ogni possibile aspetto; come se io avessi mai supposto nulla del genere. Voglio tornare a quel luogo particolare, non perché fosse tutto ciò che la mia fantasia dipinge, o perché fosse il miglior luogo che la mia fantasia possa dipingere; ma perché era un luogo mille volte migliore della trappola in cui lui e i suoi simili mi hanno cacciato. Ma soprattutto voglio tornarvi, non perché sappia che era il luogo giusto, ma perché penso che fosse la svolta giusta. E la svolta giusta avrebbe forse potuto condurmi al luogo giusto; mentre la guida progressista mi ha con tutta certezza condotto a quello sbagliato.
Ora, è del tutto vero che vi è minore testimonianza umana generale a favore della nozione di una Nuova Gerusalemme nel futuro che non a favore della nozione di un’Età dell’Oro nel passato. Ma nessuna di quelle due idee, siano o no illusioni, costituisce una risposta alla domanda di un uomo comune nella comune posizione di questa parabola; un uomo che deve trovare qualche guida nel passato se vuole ottenere qualche bene nel futuro. Ciò che egli conosce positivamente, in ogni caso, è il completo crollo del presente. Ora, questa è l’esatta verità riguardo a quella cosa così spesso rimproverata come un ritorno romantico e irreale degli uomini moderni alle cose medievali. Suppongono di aver preso la svolta sbagliata, perché sanno di trovarsi nel luogo sbagliato. Per saperlo, non è necessario idealizzare il mondo medievale, ma soltanto rendersi conto del mondo moderno. Non è tanto che suppongano il mondo medievale al di sopra della media, quanto che si sentono certi che il mondo moderno è al di sotto della media. Non partono né dall’idea che l’uomo sia destinato a vivere in una Nuova Gerusalemme di perla e zaffiro nel futuro, né che un uomo fosse destinato a vivere in una pittoresca e riccamente dipinta taverna del passato; ma con una forte e intima persuasione personale che un uomo non fosse destinato a vivere in una trappola.
Poiché vi è, e sempre più vi sarà, una svolta di totale cambiamento in tutto il nostro parlare e scrivere di storia. Tutto nel passato veniva lodato se aveva condotto al presente, e biasimato se avrebbe condotto a qualcos’altro. Insomma, tutti hanno frugato nel passato in cerca del segreto del nostro successo. Ben presto tutti potrebbero frugare nel passato in cerca del segreto del nostro fallimento. Potrebbero parlare negli stessi termini che si usano dopo un incidente d’auto o una bancarotta: dov’è stato l’errore? Potrebbero scrivere libri quali scrivono i generali dopo una sconfitta militare: di chi fu la colpa? Il fallimento sarà dato per scontato perfino nell’essere spiegato.
Poiché l’industrialismo non è più un volgare successo. Al contrario, è ormai troppo tragico persino per essere volgare. Sotto la nube del destino la città moderna ha assunto qualcosa della dignità di Babele o di Babilonia. Che la chiamiamo la nemesi del Capitalismo o l’incubo del Bolscevismo non fa differenza; i ricchi si lamentano quanto i poveri; ognuno è scontento, e nessuno più di coloro che sono principalmente scontenti dello scontento. Riguardo a quella discordia siamo in perfetta armonia; riguardo a quella malattia pensiamo tutti allo stesso modo, qualunque cosa pensiamo della diagnosi o della cura. Con qualunque processo nel passato potessimo essere giunti al luogo giusto, i fatti pratici nel presente e nel futuro proveranno sempre più che siamo giunti al luogo sbagliato. E per molti un presentimento diverrà sempre più una probabilità: che possiamo o no attendere un altro secolo o un altro mondo per vedere la Nuova Gerusalemme riedificata e splendente sui nostri campi; ma nella carne vedremo cadere Babilonia.
Ma c’è un altro modo in cui quella metafora della strada biforcuta renderà chiara la posizione. La società medievale non era il luogo giusto; era solo la svolta giusta. Era solo la strada giusta; o forse solo l’inizio della strada giusta. L’età medievale era ben lungi dall’essere l’età in cui tutto andò bene. Sarebbe più vicino alla verità che intendo chiamarla l’età in cui tutto andò male. Fu il momento in cui le cose avrebbero potuto svilupparsi bene, e si svilupparono male. O piuttosto, per essere ancor più esatti, fu il momento in cui si stavano sviluppando bene, eppure furono spinte a svilupparsi male. Questa fu la storia di tutti gli stati medievali e di nessuno più della Gerusalemme medievale; anzi vi erano segni di qualche seria idea di farne lo stato medievale modello. Di questa nozione di Gerusalemme come Nuova Gerusalemme, dell’aspetto utopico dell’avventura del Regno Latino, si potrà dire qualcosa tra un momento. Ma intanto vi fu una parte più importante recitata da Gerusalemme, credo, in tutto quel grande progresso e reazione che ci ha lasciato il problema dell’Europa moderna. E il suggerimento di ciò è legato al precedente suggerimento, sulla differenza tra la meta e la strada giusta che avrebbe potuto condurvi. È legato a quella qualità della civiltà in questione, che essa era potenziale piuttosto che perfetta; e non c’è bisogno di idealizzarla per rimpiangerla. Questa peculiare parte recitata da Gerusalemme la menziono soltanto come un suggerimento; potrei quasi dire un sospetto. In ogni caso, è qualcosa come una congettura; ma io, per parte mia, l’ho trovata una guida.
Medievalism died, but it died young. It was at once energetic and incomplete when it died, or very shortly before it died. This is not a matter of sympathy or antipathy, but of appreciation of an interesting historic comparison with other historic cases. When the Roman Empire finally failed we cannot of course say that 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 done certain 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 was Christian but most of the provinces still heathen. Then we should have 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 is very much the truth in the matter of the medieval civilisation. It was not merely that the medievals left undone what they might have done, but they left undone what they were doing. This potential promise 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-work were developed, not only less than they should have been, but less than they would have been. There is no sort of reason why their sculpture should not have become as perfect as their architecture; there is no sort of reason why their sense of form should not have been as finished as their sense of colour. A statue like the St. George of Donatello would have stood more 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 status of the craftsman. The best proof that the system of the guilds had an undeveloped good in it is that the most advanced modern men are 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 our very pioneers are now digging in the ruins to find the riches. That the new guildsmen add a great deal that never belonged to the old guildsmen is not only a truth, but is part of the truth I maintain here. The new guildsmen add what the old guildsmen 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 yet visible in the new; such as individual humour in the handiwork. The point here, however, is not merely that the worker worked well but that he was working better; not merely that his mind was free but that it was growing freer. All this popular power and humour was increasing 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 does not show an individual interest in his work. But it will be well to realise that they would be much more annoyed with him if he did. The medieval workman took so individual an interest in his work that 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 them as ugly as devils; carving anti-clerical caricatures on the very seats and stalls of the clerics. If a modern householder, on entering his own bathroom, found that the plumber had twisted the taps into the images of 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 likeness of himself, his surprise might even be tinged with disapproval. It may be just as well that builders and bricklayers do not gratuitously attach gargoyles to our smaller residential villas. But well or ill, it is certainly true that this feature of a flexible popular fancy has never reappeared in any school of architecture or any state of society since the medieval decline. The great classical buildings of the Renascence were swept as bare of it as any villa in Balham. But those who best appreciate this loss to popular art will be the first to agree that at its best it retained a touch of the barbaric as well as the popular. While we can admire these matters of the grotesque, we can admit that their work was sometimes unintentionally as well as intentionally grotesque. Some of the carving did remain so rude that the angels were almost as ugly as the devils. But this is the very point upon which I would here insist; the mystery of why men who were so obviously only 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 most modern 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 progress in all history. Men have seldom moved with such rapidity and such unity from barbarism to civilisation as they did from the end of the Dark Ages to the times of the universities and the parliaments, the cathedrals and the guilds. Up to a certain point we may say that everything, at whatever stage of improvement, was full of the promise of improvement. Then something began to go wrong, almost equally rapidly, and the glory of this great culture is not so much in what it did as in what it might have done. It recalls one of these typical medieval speculations, full of the very fantasy of free will, in which the schoolmen tried to fancy the fate of every herb or animal if Adam had not eaten the apple. It remains, in a cant historical phrase, one of the great might-have-beens of history.
Il medievalismo morì, ma morì giovane. Era al tempo stesso energico e incompleto quando morì, o pochissimo prima di morire. Questo non è una questione di simpatia o antipatia, ma di apprezzamento di un interessante confronto storico con altri casi storici. Quando l’Impero Romano finalmente cadde non possiamo certo dire che avesse fatto tutto ciò che era destinato a fare, poiché questo è dogmatismo. Non possiamo nemmeno dire che avesse fatto tutto ciò che avrebbe potuto fare, poiché questo è congettura. Ma possiamo dire che aveva fatto certe cose definite ed era consapevole di averle fatte; che aveva a lungo, e anche letteralmente, riposato sui suoi allori. Ma supponiamo che Roma fosse caduta quando aveva solo mezza sconfitto Cartagine, o quando aveva solo mezza conquistato la Gallia, o anche quando la città era cristiana ma la maggior parte delle province ancora pagana. Allora avremmo detto, non semplicemente che Roma non aveva fatto ciò che avrebbe potuto fare, ma che non aveva fatto ciò che stava effettivamente facendo. E questa è in gran parte la verità nella questione della civiltà medievale. Non era semplicemente che i medievali lasciarono incompiuto ciò che avrebbero potuto fare, ma lasciarono incompiuto ciò che stavano facendo. Questa promessa potenziale è provata non solo dai loro successi ma dai loro fallimenti. Si mostra, per esempio, nei difetti stessi della loro arte. Tutte le arti di cui l’architettura gotica formava l’ossatura furono sviluppate, non solo meno di quanto avrebbero dovuto, ma meno di quanto sarebbero state. Non c’è alcuna ragione per cui la loro scultura non avrebbe dovuto diventare perfetta quanto la loro architettura; non c’è alcuna ragione per cui il loro senso della forma non sarebbe dovuto essere compiuto quanto il loro senso del colore. Una statua come il San Giorgio di Donatello sarebbe stata più appropriatamente sotto un arco gotico che sotto uno classico. Le nicchie erano già fatte per le statue. Lo stesso vale, naturalmente, non solo per lo stato delle arti ma per la condizione dell’artigiano. La miglior prova che il sistema delle corporazioni conteneva in sé un bene non sviluppato è che gli uomini moderni più avanzati stanno ora tornando indietro di cinquecento anni per trarne il bene. La miglior prova che una ricca casa fu portata in rovina è che i nostri stessi pionieri stanno ora scavando tra le rovine per trovarne le ricchezze. Che i nuovi corporati aggiungano molto che mai appartenne agli antichi corporati non è solo una verità, ma è parte della verità che qui sostengo. I nuovi corporati aggiungono ciò che gli antichi corporati avrebbero aggiunto se non fossero morti giovani. Quando rinnoviamo una cosa frustrata non rinnoviamo la frustrazione. Ma se vi sono alcune cose nel nuovo che non erano nell’antico, vi erano certamente alcune cose nell’antico che non sono ancora visibili nel nuovo; come l’umorismo individuale nel manufatto. Il punto qui, tuttavia, non è soltanto che l’operaio lavorava bene ma che stava lavorando meglio; non soltanto che la sua mente era libera ma che stava divenendo più libera. Tutta questa potenza e questo umorismo popolare andavano crescendo dovunque, quando qualcosa li toccò e li fece appassire. Il gelo li aveva colpiti in primavera.
Alcuni si lamentano che l’operaio dei nostri giorni non mostra un interesse individuale per il proprio lavoro. Ma sarà bene rendersi conto che sarebbero molto più infastiditi da lui se lo facesse. L’operaio medievale prendeva un interesse così individuale nel proprio lavoro che evocava diavoli interamente di propria iniziativa, intagliandoli negli angoli secondo il proprio gusto e la propria fantasia. Riproduceva perfino i preti che erano i suoi patroni e li rendeva brutti come diavoli; intagliando caricature anticlericali proprio sui seggi e sugli stalli dei chierici. Se un moderno padrone di casa, entrando nel proprio bagno, scoprisse che l’idraulico ha attorcigliato i rubinetti nelle immagini di due demoni cornuti e ghignanti, sarebbe lievemente sorpreso. Se il padrone di casa, tornando la sera alla propria casa, trovasse il batacchio della porta deformato in una ripugnante somiglianza di se stesso, la sua sorpresa potrebbe perfino tingersi di disapprovazione. Può darsi che sia altrettanto bene che costruttori e muratori non attacchino gratuitamente gargolle alle nostre più piccole villette residenziali. Ma bene o male, è certamente vero che questo tratto di una flessibile fantasia popolare non è mai riapparso in alcuna scuola di architettura o in alcuno stato della società dal declino medievale. I grandi edifici classici del Rinascimento ne furono spazzati via nudi quanto qualsiasi villa a Balham. Ma coloro che meglio apprezzano questa perdita per l’arte popolare saranno i primi a convenire che al suo meglio essa conservava un tocco del barbarico non meno che del popolare. Pur potendo ammirare queste faccende del grottesco, possiamo ammettere che la loro opera era talvolta involontariamente non meno che intenzionalmente grottesca. Parte dell’intaglio rimase così rozza che gli angeli erano quasi brutti quanto i diavoli. Ma questo è proprio il punto su cui qui vorrei insistere: il mistero del perché uomini che stavano così evidentemente solo cominciando si siano così d’un tratto fermati.
Gli uomini con simpatie medievali sono talvolta accusati, abbastanza assurdamente, di cercare di provare che il periodo medievale fosse perfetto. In verità l’intera tesi a suo favore è che era imperfetto. Era imperfetto come è imperfetto un frutto acerbo o un bambino in crescita. Anzi era imperfetto proprio in quel modo particolare che la maggior parte dei pensatori moderni generalmente loda, più di quanto lodino mai la maturità. Era qualcosa ora assai più popolare di un’età di perfezione; era un’età di progresso. Era forse l’unica vera età di progresso in tutta la storia. Raramente gli uomini si sono mossi con tale rapidità e tale unità dalla barbarie alla civiltà come fecero dalla fine dei Secoli Bui ai tempi delle università e dei parlamenti, delle cattedrali e delle corporazioni. Fino a un certo punto possiamo dire che ogni cosa, a qualunque stadio di miglioramento, era piena della promessa del miglioramento. Poi qualcosa cominciò ad andare storto, quasi altrettanto rapidamente, e la gloria di questa grande cultura non sta tanto in ciò che fece quanto in ciò che avrebbe potuto fare. Richiama una di quelle tipiche speculazioni medievali, piene della fantasia stessa del libero arbitrio, in cui gli scolastici cercavano di immaginare la sorte di ogni erba o animale se Adamo non avesse mangiato la mela. Rimane, in una trita frase storica, uno dei grandi ciò-che-sarebbe-potuto-essere della storia.
I have said that it died young; but perhaps it would be truer to say that it suddenly grew old. Like Godfrey and many of its great champions in Jerusalem, 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 explain that secret and rapid decay of medieval civilisation from within. Only a few generations separated the world that worshipped St. Francis from the world that burned Joan of Arc. One would think there might be no more than a date and a number between the white mystery of Louis the Ninth and the black mystery of Louis the Eleventh. This is the very real historical mystery; the more realistic is our study of medieval things, the more puzzled we shall be about the peculiar creeping 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 guildsmen and 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 Reformation was a just revolt and revenge or an unjust culmination and conquest. It is common ground to Catholics and Protestants of intelligence that evils preceded and produced the schism; and that evils were produced by it and have pursued it down to our own day. We know it if only in the one example, that the schism begat the Thirty Years’ War, and the Thirty Years’ War begat the Seven 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 erect an ethical system external to the whole culture of Christendom. But it can still be reasonably asked what begat the schism; and it can still 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 a fixed fancy that I knew what it was. It is a thing that cannot be 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 heart went out of it with the loss of Jerusalem. Let it be observed that I do not say the loss of the war, or even the Crusade. For the war against Islam was not lost. The Moslem was overthrown in 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 was a vision; something with which all stories stop, something where the rainbow ends, something over the hills and far away. In Spain they had been victorious; but their castle was not even a castle in Spain. It was a castle east of the sun and west of 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 they said in the very centre of the earth. It is east of the sun of 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 mirror for poets and a most fatal magnet for lunatics.
Anyhow the fall of Jerusalem, and in that sense the failure of the Crusades, had a widespread effect, as I should myself suggest, for the reason I have myself suggested. Because it had been a popular movement, it was a popular disappointment; and because it had been a popular movement, its ideal was an image; a particular picture in 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 stage properties required for some village play, one of those popular plays acted by the medieval trades unions, for which the guild of the shipwrights would build Noah’s Ark or the guild of the barbers provide golden wigs for the haloes of the Twelve Apostles. The list of those crude pieces of stage furniture had a curious colour of poetry about it, like the impromptu apparatus of a nursery charade; a cloud, an idol with a club, and notably among the rest, the walls and towers of Jerusalem. I can imagine them patiently painted and gilded as 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 towers of wood and pasteboard with a sort of pain, and perhaps put them away in a corner, as a child will tire of a toy especially if it is associated with a disappointment or a dismal misunderstanding. There is noticeable in some of the later popular poems a disposition to sulk about the Crusades. But though the popular feeling had been largely poetical, the same thing did in its degree 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 due to 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 own vision of invincibility. That was the conviction of those of us who would not accept what we considered a premature peace with Prussia. That is why we would not listen either to the Tory Pro-Germanism of Lord Lansdowne or the Socialist Pro-Germanism of Mr. Macdonald. If a lunatic believes in his luck so fixedly as to feel sure be cannot be caught, he will not only believe in it still, but believe in 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 almost a divine intervention, not only to the pursued but to the pursuers. The evil thing will chiefly appear unconquerable to those who try to conquer it. It will seem after all to have a secret of success; and those who failed against it will hide in their hearts a 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 guilds and schools and orders of knighthood and brotherhoods of friars were strangely changed and chilled. So, if the peace had left Prussianism secure even in Prussia, I believe that all the liberal ideals 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 headlines than blazon heraldic coats. For these medieval things look dead and dusty because of a defeat, which was none the less a defeat because it was more than half a victory.
Ho detto che morì giovane; ma forse sarebbe più vero dire che improvvisamente invecchiò. Come Goffredo e molti dei suoi grandi campioni a Gerusalemme, fu colto nel fiore della vita da un misterioso morbo. Più un uomo legge di storia meno facile troverà spiegare quel segreto e rapido declino della civiltà medievale dall’interno. Solo poche generazioni separavano il mondo che venerava San Francesco dal mondo che bruciò Giovanna d’Arco. Si penserebbe che non vi possa essere più di una data e di un numero tra il bianco mistero di Luigi Nono e il nero mistero di Luigi Undicesimo. Questo è il vero mistero storico; quanto più realistico è il nostro studio delle cose medievali, tanto più saremo sconcertati riguardo alla peculiare paralisi strisciante che colpì cose così virili e così piene di speranza. Vi fu una crescita di morbosità morale non meno che di inefficienza sociale, specialmente nelle classi dirigenti; poiché perfino fino alla fine i corporati e i contadini rimasero assai più vigorosi. Come finì lo sappiamo tutti; personalmente direi che ebbero la Riforma e la meritarono. Ma nulla importa alla verità qui esposta se la Riforma fu una giusta rivolta e vendetta o un’ingiusta culminazione e conquista. È terreno comune ai cattolici e ai protestanti intelligenti che dei mali precedettero e produssero lo scisma; e che dei mali furono da esso prodotti e l’hanno inseguito fino ai nostri giorni. Lo sappiamo se non altro nell’unico esempio che lo scisma generò la Guerra dei Trent’anni, e la Guerra dei Trent’anni generò la Guerra dei Sette anni, e la Guerra dei Sette anni generò la Grande Guerra, che è passata come una pestilenza attraverso le nostre stesse case. Dopo lo scisma la Prussia poté ricadere nel paganesimo ed erigere un sistema etico esterno all’intera cultura della Cristianità. Ma si può ancora ragionevolmente chiedere cosa generò lo scisma; e si può ancora ragionevolmente rispondere: qualcosa che andò storto nel medievalismo. Ma cosa fu che andò storto?
Quando guardai per l’ultima volta le torri di Sion ebbi la ferma fantasia di sapere cosa fosse. È una cosa che non può essere provata né smentita; deve suonare come una semplice congettura ignorante. Ma io credo che morì di delusione. Credo che l’intera società medievale fallì, perché il cuore le venne meno con la perdita di Gerusalemme. Si osservi che non dico la perdita della guerra, e neppure della Crociata. Poiché la guerra contro l’Islam non fu perduta. Il Musulmano fu abbattuto nel vero campo di battaglia, che era la Spagna; fu minacciato in Africa; il suo potere imperiale era già colpito e cominciava lentamente a declinare. Non intendo i calcoli politici su una guerra mediterranea. Non intendo neppure le concezioni papali sulla Guerra Santa. Intendo la puramente popolare immagine della Santa Città. Poiché mentre la cosa aristocratica era una veduta, la cosa volgare era una visione; qualcosa con cui tutte le storie si fermano, qualcosa dove finisce l’arcobaleno, qualcosa oltre i colli e lontano. In Spagna erano stati vittoriosi; ma il loro castello non era neppure un castello in Spagna. Era un castello a est del sole e a ovest della luna, e il principe delle fiabe non riusciva più a trovarlo. Invero quell’oziosa immagine dei libri dell’infanzia le si adatta assai esattamente. Poiché il suo mistero era ed è nello stare nel mezzo, o come dicevano nel centro stesso della terra. È a est del sole d’Europa, che riempie il mondo di una luce diurna di assennatezza, e fa maturare cose reali e crescenti. È a ovest della luna d’Asia, misteriosa e arcaica con i suoi freddi vulcani, argenteo specchio per i poeti e magnete oltremodo fatale per i lunatici.
In ogni caso la caduta di Gerusalemme, e in tal senso il fallimento delle Crociate, ebbe un effetto diffuso, come io stesso suggerirei, per la ragione che io stesso ho suggerito. Poiché era stato un movimento popolare, fu una delusione popolare; e poiché era stato un movimento popolare, il suo ideale era un’immagine; un particolare quadro nell’immaginazione. Poiché i poveri sono quasi sempre particolaristi; e nessuno ha mai visto una cosa come una folla di panteisti. Ho visto in parte di quella perduta letteratura delle antiche corporazioni, che ora dovunque viene alla luce, un elenco degli oggetti di scena richiesti per qualche recita di villaggio, una di quelle recite popolari messe in scena dalle medievali unioni di mestiere, per le quali la corporazione dei carpentieri navali costruiva l’Arca di Noè o la corporazione dei barbieri forniva parrucche dorate per le aureole dei Dodici Apostoli. L’elenco di quei rozzi pezzi di arredo scenico aveva un curioso colore di poesia, come l’improvvisato apparato di una sciarada da bambini; una nuvola, un idolo con una clava, e in particolare tra il resto, le mura e le torri di Gerusalemme. Posso immaginarle pazientemente dipinte e dorate come una caratteristica speciale, come i due tini del signor Vincent Crummles. Ma posso anche immaginare che verso la fine del Medioevo il maestro delle feste cominciasse a guardare quelle torri di legno e cartone con una sorta di pena, e forse a riporle in un angolo, come un bambino si stanca di un giocattolo specialmente se è associato a una delusione o a un cupo malinteso. È notabile in alcune delle più tarde poesie popolari una disposizione a tenere il broncio riguardo alle Crociate. Ma benché il sentimento popolare fosse stato in gran parte poetico, la stessa cosa avvenne nel suo grado nel regno politico che era puramente pratico. Il Musulmano era stato frenato, ma non era stato frenato abbastanza. L’intera storia di ciò che fu chiamato la Questione d’Oriente, e i tre quarti delle guerre del mondo moderno, furono dovuti al fatto che non fu frenato abbastanza.
L’unica cosa da fare con le cose inconquistabili è conquistarle. Questo soltanto le guarirà dell’invincibilità; o, ciò che è peggio, della loro stessa visione dell’invincibilità. Questa era la convinzione di quelli tra noi che non volevano accettare quella che consideravamo una pace prematura con la Prussia. Ecco perché non volevamo dare ascolto né al filo-germanesimo tory di Lord Lansdowne né al filo-germanesimo socialista del signor Macdonald. Se un lunatico crede nella propria fortuna così fermamente da sentirsi certo di non poter essere catturato, non solo continuerà a crederci, ma vi crederà sempre di più, fino all’istante stesso in cui è catturato. Più lunga la caccia, più certo sarà di sfuggire; più stretti gli scampi, più certa sarà la fuga. E invero se scampa sembrerà un miracolo, e quasi un intervento divino, non solo all’inseguito ma agli inseguitori. La cosa malvagia apparirà inconquistabile soprattutto a coloro che cercano di conquistarla. Sembrerà dopotutto avere un segreto di successo; e coloro che fallirono contro di essa nasconderanno nei loro cuori un segreto di fallimento. Fu quel segreto di fallimento, immagino, che lentamente inaridì dall’interno le alte speranze del Medioevo. Il Cristianesimo e la cavalleria avevano misurato la propria forza contro Maometto, e Maometto non era caduto; l’ombra del suo elmo cornuto, la cresta della Mezzaluna, giaceva ancora sulle loro terre più soleggiate; i Corni di Hattin. Le correnti di vita che affluivano alle corporazioni e alle scuole e agli ordini cavallereschi e alle confraternite dei frati furono stranamente mutate e raffreddate. Così, se la pace avesse lasciato il prussianesimo al sicuro perfino in Prussia, credo che tutti gli ideali liberali dei Latini, e tutte le libertà degli Inglesi, e l’intera teoria di un esperimento democratico in America, avrebbero cominciato a morire di una profonda e persino subconscia disperazione. Un voto, una giuria, un giornale, non sarebbero quali sono, cose di cui è difficile fare il giusto uso, o qualsiasi uso; sarebbero cose di cui nessuno cercherebbe nemmeno di fare alcun uso. Un voto sembrerebbe davvero il grido «haro» di un vassallo, una giuria sembrerebbe una giostra; molti non leggerebbero i titoli dei giornali più di quanto blasonassero stemmi araldici. Poiché queste cose medievali sembrano morte e polverose a causa di una sconfitta, che non fu meno una sconfitta per il fatto di essere più che mezza vittoria.
A curious cloud of confusion rests on the details of that defeat. The Christian captains who acted in it were certainly men on a different moral level from the good Duke Godfrey; their characters were by comparison mixed and even mysterious. Perhaps the two determining personalities were Raymond of Tripoli, a skilful soldier whom his enemies seemed to have accused of being much too skilful a diplomatist; and Renaud of Chatillon, a violent adventurer whom his enemies seem to have accused of being little better than a bandit. And it is the irony of the incident that Raymond got into trouble for making a dubious peace with the Saracens, while Renaud got into trouble by making an equally dubious war on the Saracens. Renaud exacted from Moslem travellers on a certain road what he regarded as a sort of feudal toll or tax, and they regarded as a brigand ransom; and when they did not pay he attacked them. This was regarded as a breach of the truce; but probably it would have 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 gave up to the very instant of catastrophe was entirely loyal and sound, and worthy of so wise a veteran. And very likely Renaud was not merely a robber, especially in his own eyes; and there seems to be a much better case for him than many modern writers allow. But the very fact of such charges being bandied among the factions shows a certain fall from the first days under the headship of the house of Bouillon. No slanderer ever suggested that Godfrey was a traitor; no enemy ever asserted that Godfrey was only a thief. It is fairly clear that there had been a degeneration; but most people hardly realise sufficiently that there had been a very great thing from which to degenerate.
The first Crusades had really had some notion of Jerusalem as a New Jerusalem. I mean they had really had a vision of the place being not 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 of the social experiments in the rest of Christendom. Having to begin at the beginning, they really began with what they considered the best ideas of their time; like any group of Socialists founding an ideal Commonwealth in a modern colony. A specialist on this period, Colonel Conder of the Palestine Exploration, has written that the core of the Code was founded on the recommendations of Godfrey himself in his “Letters of the Sepulchre”; and he observes concerning it: “The basis of these laws was found in Justinian’s code, and they presented features as yet quite unknown in Europe, especially in their careful 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 same applied to those who were technically serfs and actually aborigines.” The original arrangements of the Native Court seem to me singularly liberal, even by modern standards of the treatment of natives. That in many such medieval codes citizens were still called serfs is no more final than the fact that in many modern capitalist newspapers serfs are still called citizens. The whole point about the villein was that he was a tenant at least as permanent as a peasant. He “went with the land”; and there are a good many hopeless tramps starving in streets, or sleeping in ditches, who might not be sorry if they could go with a little land. It would not be very much worse than homelessness and hunger to go with a good kitchen garden of which you could always eat most of the beans and turnips; or to go with a good cornfield of which you could take a considerable proportion of the corn. There has been many a modern man would have been none 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 already evolving rapidly into a pure peasant proprietorship; and it will be long before industrialism evolves by itself into anything so equal or so free. Above all, there appears notably that universal mark of the medieval movement; the voluntary liberation of slaves. But we may willingly allow that something of the earlier success of all this was due to the personal qualities of the first knights fresh from the West; and especially to the personal justice and 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 Armenian princes 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 seems to have been regarded as a somewhat unsatisfactory character. He had quarrelled with Raymond, who was ruler of Galilee, and a curious 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 furious Templar, Gerard of Bideford, of which mention has been made already. But the most serious threat to them and their New Jerusalem was 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 ambition and ardour of Saladin.
With the breach of the truce, or even the tale of it, the common danger of Christians was apparent; and Raymond of Tripoli repaired to 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 waterless wastes between them and the enemy. Into those wastes they advanced, and they were already weary and unfit for warfare by the time they came in sight of the strange hills that will be remembered for 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 had fallen gathered in a final defiance and despair round the relic they carried in their midst, a fragment of the True Cross. In that hour fell, as I have fancied, more hopes than they themselves could number, and the glory departed from the Middle Ages. There fell with them all that New Jerusalem which was the symbol of a new world, all those great and growing promises and possibilities of Christendom of which this vision was the centre, all that “justice for 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 wedded to charity and to chivalry. There was the first slip and the great swerving of our fate; and in that wilderness we lost all the things we should have loved, and shall need so long a labour to find again.
Una curiosa nube di confusione grava sui dettagli di quella sconfitta. I capitani cristiani che vi presero parte erano certamente uomini di un livello morale diverso da quello del buon Duca Goffredo; i loro caratteri erano al confronto misti e persino misteriosi. Forse le due personalità determinanti furono Raimondo di Tripoli, un abile soldato che i suoi nemici sembrano aver accusato di essere un diplomatico fin troppo abile; e Renaud di Chatillon, un violento avventuriero che i suoi nemici sembrano aver accusato di essere poco meglio di un bandito. Ed è l’ironia dell’episodio che Raimondo si mise nei guai per aver fatto una dubbia pace con i Saraceni, mentre Renaud si mise nei guai per aver fatto un’altrettanto dubbia guerra ai Saraceni. Renaud esigeva dai viaggiatori musulmani su una certa strada ciò che egli considerava una sorta di pedaggio o tassa feudale, e che essi consideravano un riscatto da brigante; e quando non pagavano li assaliva. Ciò fu considerato una violazione della tregua; ma probabilmente sarebbe stato più facile considerare Renaud come colui che conduceva la guerra di un ladrone, se molti non avessero considerato Raimondo come colui che aveva stipulato la tregua di un traditore. Probabilmente Raimondo non era un traditore, giacché il consiglio militare che diede fino all’istante stesso della catastrofe fu interamente leale e saggio, e degno di un veterano tanto savio. E assai probabilmente Renaud non era semplicemente un ladrone, specialmente ai propri occhi; e sembra esserci a suo favore un caso assai migliore di quanto molti scrittori moderni concedano. Ma il fatto stesso che simili accuse fossero scambiate tra le fazioni mostra una certa caduta rispetto ai primi giorni sotto il capo della casa di Buglione. Nessun calunniatore suggerì mai che Goffredo fosse un traditore; nessun nemico affermò mai che Goffredo fosse solo un ladro. È abbastanza chiaro che vi era stata una degenerazione; ma la maggior parte della gente difficilmente si rende conto a sufficienza che vi era stata una cosa assai grande da cui degenerare.
Le prime Crociate avevano davvero avuto una qualche nozione di Gerusalemme come Nuova Gerusalemme. Voglio dire che avevano davvero avuto una visione del luogo come non solo una terra promessa ma un’Utopia o persino un Paradiso Terrestre. Il fatto e il tratto saliente che di rado viene colto è questo: che l’esperimento sociale in Palestina era piuttosto in anticipo sugli esperimenti sociali nel resto della Cristianità. Dovendo cominciare dal principio, cominciarono davvero con quelle che consideravano le migliori idee del loro tempo; come un qualsiasi gruppo di socialisti che fondi un Commonwealth ideale in una colonia moderna. Uno specialista di questo periodo, il colonnello Conder del Palestine Exploration, ha scritto che il nucleo del Codice fu fondato sulle raccomandazioni di Goffredo stesso nelle sue “Lettere del Sepolcro”; e osserva a suo riguardo: «La base di queste leggi si trovava nel codice di Giustiniano, ed esse presentavano caratteri fino ad allora del tutto ignoti in Europa, specialmente nella loro accurata previsione di giustizia per il borghese e il contadino, e per i comuni mercantili le cui flotte erano così necessarie al re. Non solo gli uomini liberi venivano giudicati da giurie di loro pari, ma lo stesso valeva per coloro che erano tecnicamente servi e in effetti indigeni.» Le disposizioni originali della Corte Nativa mi sembrano singolarmente liberali, anche secondo i moderni criteri del trattamento degli indigeni. Che in molti di tali codici medievali i cittadini fossero ancora chiamati servi non è più decisivo del fatto che in molti moderni giornali capitalisti i servi siano ancora chiamati cittadini. Tutto il punto riguardo al villano era che egli era un affittuario permanente almeno quanto un contadino. Egli «andava con la terra»; e vi sono parecchi vagabondi senza speranza che muoiono di fame nelle strade, o dormono nei fossi, che potrebbero non dispiacersi se potessero andare con un po’ di terra. Non sarebbe molto peggio della mancanza di tetto e della fame andare con un buon orto di cui si potesse sempre mangiare la maggior parte dei fagioli e delle rape; o andare con un buon campo di grano di cui si potesse prendere una considerevole proporzione del grano. Vi è stato più di un uomo moderno che non sarebbe stato affatto peggio per l’«andare» gravato di una tale verde isola, o per il trascinare le catene di un tale groviglio di verdi cose viventi. Di fatto, naturalmente, questo sistema in tutta la Cristianità si stava già evolvendo rapidamente in una pura piccola proprietà contadina; e passerà molto tempo prima che l’industrialismo si evolva da sé in qualcosa di così equo o così libero. Soprattutto, vi appare notevolmente quel segno universale del movimento medievale: la liberazione volontaria degli schiavi. Ma possiamo volentieri ammettere che qualcosa del precedente successo di tutto ciò fu dovuto alle qualità personali dei primi cavalieri freschi d’Occidente; e specialmente alla personale giustizia e moderazione di Goffredo e di alcuni dei suoi parenti più prossimi. Goffredo morì giovane; i suoi successori ebbero per lo più brevi periodi di potere, in gran parte a causa del prevalere della malaria e dell’assenza di medicina. I matrimoni regali con la più orientale tradizione dei principi armeni introdussero nuovi elementi di lusso e cinismo; e al tempo della contestata tregua di Raimondo di Tripoli, la corona era discesa a un uomo di nome Guido di Lusignano che sembra essere stato considerato un carattere alquanto insoddisfacente. Aveva litigato con Raimondo, che era signore della Galilea, e una curiosa e piuttosto incomprensibile concessione fatta da quest’ultimo, che i Saraceni potessero cavalcare in armi ma in pace intorno alla sua terra, condusse a presunti insulti musulmani a Nazaret, e allo scoppio del furioso Templare, Gerard di Bideford, del quale si è già fatta menzione. Ma la più seria minaccia per loro e per la loro Nuova Gerusalemme fu l’emergere tra i Musulmani di un uomo di genio militare, e il fatto che tutta quella terra giacesse ora sotto l’ombra dell’ambizione e dell’ardore di Saladino.
Con la rottura della tregua, o anche solo il racconto di essa, il comune pericolo dei cristiani divenne evidente; e Raimondo di Tripoli si recò al quartier generale reale per consultarsi con il suo recente nemico, il re; ma sembra essere stato trattato quasi apertamente come un traditore. Gerard di Bideford, il fanatico che era Gran Maestro dei Templari, forzò la mano del re contro il consiglio del soldato più savio, che aveva additato il pericolo di perire di sete nelle desolazioni senz’acqua tra loro e il nemico. In quelle desolazioni avanzarono, ed erano già stanchi e inadatti alla guerra al tempo in cui giunsero in vista delle strane colline che saranno per sempre ricordate sotto il nome dei Corni di Hattin. Su quelle colline, poche ore più tardi, gli ultimi cavalieri di un esercito di cui metà era caduta si raccolsero in un’estrema sfida e disperazione intorno alla reliquia che portavano in mezzo a loro, un frammento della Vera Croce. In quell’ora caddero, come ho immaginato, più speranze di quante essi stessi potessero contare, e la gloria si dipartì dal Medioevo. Con loro cadde tutta quella Nuova Gerusalemme che era il simbolo di un nuovo mondo, tutte quelle grandi e crescenti promesse e possibilità della Cristianità di cui questa visione era il centro, tutta quella «giustizia per il borghese e il contadino, e per i comuni mercantili», tutte le corporazioni che ottennero le loro carte combattendo per la Croce, tutte le speranze di una più felice trasformazione del Diritto Romano unito alla Carità e alla cavalleria. Là fu il primo scivolone e la grande sterzata del nostro destino; e in quella terra selvaggia perdemmo tutte le cose che avremmo dovuto amare, e per ritrovare le quali ci occorrerà una così lunga fatica.
Raymond of Tripoli had hewn his way through the enemy and ridden away 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 strains in the creed or the culture that triumphed on that day; the stately Eastern courtesy and hospitality; the wild Eastern hatred and self-will. Saladin welcomed the king and gracefully gave 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 Renaud de Chatillon, and killed the prisoner with his own hands. Outside, two hundred Hospitallers and Templars were beheaded on the field of battle; by one account I have read because Saladin disliked them, and by another because they were Christian priests.
There is a strong bias against the Christians and in favour of the 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 history from dipping into historical novels. In those romances the Jew is always the oppressed where in reality he was often the oppressor. In those romances the Arab is always credited with oriental dignity and courtesy and never with oriental crookedness and cruelty. The same injustice is introduced into history, which by means of selection and omission can be made as fictitious as any fiction. Twenty historians mention the way in which the maddened Christian mob murdered the Moslems after the capture of Jerusalem, for one who mentions that the Moslem commander commanded in cold blood the murder of some two hundred of his most famous and valiant enemies after the victory of Hattin. The former cannot be shown to have been the act of 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 they are not judged by an equal balance. It may seem a paradox that there should 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 many Europeans against their own old religious organisation, which naturally made them hunt through all ages for its crimes and its victims. It was natural that Voltaire should sympathise more with a Brahmin he had never seen than with a Jesuit with whom he was engaged in a violent controversy; and should similarly feel more dislike of a Catholic who was his enemy than of a Moslem who was the enemy of his enemy. In this atmosphere of natural and even pardonable prejudice arose the habit of contrasting the intolerance of the Crusaders with the toleration shown by the Moslems. Now as there are two sides to everything, it would undoubtedly be quite possible to tell the tale of the Crusades, correctly enough in detail, and in such a way as entirely to justify the Moslems and condemn the Crusaders. But any such real record of the Moslem case would have very little 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 religious liberty and equality, as the moderns have not thought out any logical theory of toleration at all (for their vague generalisations can always be upset by twenty tests from Thugs to Christian Science) it would obviously be unreasonable to expect the moderns to understand the much clearer philosophy of the Moslems. But some rough suggestion of what was really involved may be found convenient 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 towards the idolatries of Asia. But Mahomet believed that these idols could 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 not only to be peculiar to Christianity but to be peculiar to Catholicism. Many things have been rejected by Protestantism that are not rejected 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 rankles in the Jews and is said sometimes to become hideously vitriolic. While I was 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 its application than any particular or passing persecution of Christians as such. It lay in the very fact that they did think they had a simpler and saner sort of Christianity, as do many modern Christians. They thought it could be made universal merely by being made uninteresting. Now a man preaching what he thinks is a platitude is far more intolerant than a man preaching what he admits is a paradox. It was exactly because it seemed self-evident, to Moslems as to Bolshevists, that their simple creed was suited to everybody, that they wished in that particular sweeping fashion to impose it on 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 allowed of those simple and masculine but mostly rather dangerous appetites that show themselves in a chieftain or a lord. As it had the simplest sort of religion, monotheism, so it had the simplest sort of government, monarchy. There was exactly the same direct spirit in its despotism as in its deism. The Code, the Common Law, the give and take of charters and 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 who complain of our creeds as elaborate often forget that the elaborate Western 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 is something much more subtle and sincere than any mere atrocity tales against Turks. It is the same as the moral of the Christian refusal of a Pagan Pantheon in which Christ should rank with Ammon and Apollo. Twice the Christian Church refused what seemed like a handsome offer of a large latitudinarian sort; once to include Christ as a god and once to include him as a prophet; once by the admission of all idols and once by the abandonment of all idols. Twice the Church took the risk and twice the Church survived alone and succeeded alone, filling the world with her own children; and leaving her rivals in a desert, where the idols were dead and the iconoclasts were dying.
Raimondo di Tripoli si era aperto la via a fendenti attraverso il nemico e se n’era andato a cavallo a Tiro. Il re, con alcuni dei nobili rimasti, incluso Renaud de Chatillon, furono condotti al cospetto di Saladino nella sua tenda. Vi si svolse una scena stranamente tipica delle mescolate correnti nel credo o nella cultura che trionfò quel giorno; la maestosa cortesia e ospitalità orientale; il selvaggio odio e l’ostinazione orientale. Saladino accolse il re e con grazia gli diede una coppa di sorbetto, che egli passò a Renaud. «Sei tu e non io che gli hai dato da bere», disse il Saraceno, preservando la precisa lettera del cerimoniale dell’ospitalità. Poi si scagliò d’un tratto, farneticando e inveendo, su Renaud de Chatillon, e uccise il prigioniero con le proprie mani. Fuori, duecento Ospitalieri e Templari furono decapitati sul campo di battaglia; secondo un resoconto che ho letto perché Saladino li detestava, e secondo un altro perché erano preti cristiani.
Vi è un forte pregiudizio contro i cristiani e a favore dei musulmani e degli ebrei nella maggior parte delle opere storiche vittoriane, specialmente nei romanzi storici. E la maggior parte della gente dei tempi moderni, o piuttosto recentissimi, ha tratto tutte le proprie nozioni di storia dallo sfogliare romanzi storici. In quei romanzi l’ebreo è sempre l’oppresso là dove in realtà era spesso l’oppressore. In quei romanzi all’arabo è sempre attribuita dignità e cortesia orientale e mai la doppiezza e la crudeltà orientale. La stessa ingiustizia è introdotta nella storia, che per mezzo di selezione e omissione può essere resa fittizia quanto qualsiasi finzione. Venti storici menzionano il modo in cui la folla cristiana impazzita massacrò i musulmani dopo la presa di Gerusalemme, per uno che menzioni che il comandante musulmano ordinò a sangue freddo l’assassinio di circa duecento dei suoi più famosi e valorosi nemici dopo la vittoria di Hattin. Del primo non si può dimostrare che fosse l’atto di Tancredi, mentre il secondo fu con tutta certezza l’atto di Saladino. Eppure Tancredi è descritto nel migliore dei casi come un carattere dubbio, mentre Saladino è rappresentato come un Bayard senza paura e senza macchia. Entrambi erano senza dubbio ordinari e fallibili uomini d’arme, ma non sono giudicati con una bilancia uguale. Può sembrare un paradosso che vi sia questo pregiudizio nella storia occidentale a favore di eroi orientali. Ma la causa è abbastanza chiara; è il residuo della rivolta tra molti europei contro la propria antica organizzazione religiosa, che naturalmente li spinse a cercare attraverso tutte le epoche i suoi crimini e le sue vittime. Era naturale che Voltaire simpatizzasse più con un bramino che non aveva mai visto che con un gesuita col quale era impegnato in una violenta controversia; e che parimenti provasse più avversione per un cattolico che era suo nemico che per un musulmano che era il nemico del suo nemico. In questa atmosfera di naturale e persino scusabile pregiudizio sorse l’abitudine di contrapporre l’intolleranza dei Crociati alla tolleranza mostrata dai musulmani. Ora, poiché vi sono due lati in ogni cosa, sarebbe indubbiamente del tutto possibile raccontare la storia delle Crociate, abbastanza correttamente nei dettagli, e in modo tale da giustificare interamente i musulmani e condannare i Crociati. Ma qualsiasi tale reale resoconto del caso musulmano avrebbe assai poco a che fare con qualsiasi questione di tolleranza o intolleranza, o con qualsiasi idea moderna sulla libertà e l’uguaglianza religiosa. Poiché il mondo moderno non sa cosa intenda esso stesso per libertà e uguaglianza religiosa, poiché i moderni non hanno affatto elaborato alcuna teoria logica della tolleranza (giacché le loro vaghe generalizzazioni possono sempre essere rovesciate da venti prove, dai Thug alla Christian Science), sarebbe ovviamente irragionevole aspettarsi che i moderni comprendano la assai più chiara filosofia dei musulmani. Ma qualche rozzo accenno a ciò che era realmente in gioco potrà tornare comodo in questo caso.
L’Islam non fu in origine affatto un movimento diretto contro il Cristianesimo. Non era rivolto a occidente, per così dire; era rivolto a oriente verso le idolatrie dell’Asia. Ma Maometto credeva che questi idoli potessero essere combattuti con maggior successo con una specie più semplice di credo; si potrebbe quasi dire con una specie più semplice di Cristianesimo. Poiché egli includeva molte cose che noi in Occidente comunemente supponiamo non solo essere peculiari del Cristianesimo ma essere peculiari del Cattolicesimo. Molte cose sono state rifiutate dal Protestantesimo che non sono rifiutate dal Maomettanesimo. Così i musulmani credono nel Purgatorio, e attribuiscono almeno una sorta di dignità alla Madre di Cristo. Riguardo a cose come queste hanno poco dell’amarezza che rode negli ebrei e che si dice diventi talvolta orribilmente vetriolica. Mentre ero in Palestina un illustre musulmano disse a un residente cristiano: «Anche noi, non meno di voi, onoriamo la Madre di Cristo. Mai parliamo di lei senza chiamarla la Signora Miriam. Non oso dirvi come la chiamano gli ebrei.»
Il vero errore dei musulmani è qualcosa di assai più moderno nella sua applicazione di qualsiasi particolare o passeggera persecuzione dei cristiani in quanto tali. Consisteva nel fatto stesso che essi pensavano di avere una specie più semplice e più sana di Cristianesimo, come fanno molti cristiani moderni. Pensavano che potesse essere reso universale semplicemente rendendolo privo di interesse. Ora un uomo che predica ciò che ritiene un’ovvietà è assai più intollerante di un uomo che predica ciò che ammette essere un paradosso. Fu proprio perché sembrava autoevidente, ai musulmani come ai bolscevichi, che il loro semplice credo era adatto a tutti, che essi desiderarono in quel particolare modo travolgente imporlo a tutti. Fu perché l’Islam era ampio che i musulmani erano angusti. E perché non era una religione dura era una regola pesante. Perché era senza una complessità autocorrettiva, permetteva quei semplici e virili ma per lo più piuttosto pericolosi appetiti che si manifestano in un capo o in un signore. Come aveva la più semplice specie di religione, il monoteismo, così aveva la più semplice specie di governo, la monarchia. Vi era esattamente lo stesso spirito diretto nel suo dispotismo come nel suo deismo. Il Codice, la Common Law, il dare e avere delle carte e dei voti cavallereschi, non crebbero in quel dorato deserto. Il grande sole era nel cielo e il grande Saladino era nella sua tenda, ed egli doveva essere obbedito a meno che non venisse assassinato. Coloro che si lamentano dei nostri credi come elaborati dimenticano spesso che gli elaborati credi occidentali hanno prodotto le elaborate costituzioni occidentali; e che sono elaborati perché sono emancipati. E la vera morale delle relazioni delle due grandi religioni è qualcosa di assai più sottile e sincero di qualsiasi mero racconto di atrocità contro i turchi. È la stessa della morale del rifiuto cristiano di un Pantheon pagano in cui Cristo figurasse alla pari con Ammone e Apollo. Due volte la Chiesa cristiana rifiutò ciò che sembrava un’offerta generosa di un ampio genere latitudinario; una volta per includere Cristo come un dio e una volta per includerlo come un profeta; una volta con l’ammissione di tutti gli idoli e una volta con l’abbandono di tutti gli idoli. Due volte la Chiesa corse il rischio e due volte la Chiesa sopravvisse sola e riuscì sola, riempiendo il mondo dei propri figli; e lasciando le sue rivali in un deserto, dove gli idoli erano morti e gli iconoclasti stavano morendo.
But all this history has been hidden by a prejudice more general than the particular case of Saracens and Crusaders. The modern, or rather the Victorian prejudice against Crusaders is positive and not relative; and it would still desire to condemn Tancred if it could not acquit Saladin. Indeed it is a prejudice not so much against Crusaders as against Christians. It will not give to these heroes of religious war the fair measure it gives to the heroes of ordinary patriotic and imperial war. There never was a nobler hero than Nelson, or one more national or more normal. Yet Nelson quite certainly did do what Tancred almost certainly did not do; break his own word by giving up his own brave enemies to execution. If the cause of Nelson in other times comes to be treated as the creed of Tancred has often in recent times been treated, this incident alone will be held sufficient to prove not only that Nelson was a liar and a scoundrel, but that he did not love England at all, did not love Lady Hamilton at all, that he sailed in English ships only to pocket the prize money of French ships, and would as willingly have sailed in French ships for the prize money of English ships. That is the sort of dull dust of gold that has been shaken like the drifting dust of the desert over the swords and the relics, the crosses and the clasped hands of the men who marched to Jerusalem or died at Hattin. In these medieval pilgrims every inconsistency is a hypocrisy; while in the more modern patriots even an infamy is only an inconsistency. I have rounded off the story here with the ruin at Hattin because the 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 upon the hills the note of the whole human revolution had been struck, was changed and was silent. All the other names were only the names of 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 top which makes it look oddly like an island, habitable though uninhabited, when all Moab heaves about it and beyond it as with the curves and colours of a sea. Its stability suggests in some strange fashion what may often be felt in these lands with the longest record of culture; that there may be not only a civilisation but even a chivalry older than history. Perhaps the table-land with its round top has a romantic reminiscence of a round table. Perhaps it is only a fantastic effect of evening, for it is felt most when the low skies are swimming with the colours of sunset, and in the shadows the shattered rocks about its base take on the shapes of titanic paladins fighting and falling around it. I only know that the mere shape of the hill and vista of the landscape suggested such visions and it was only afterwards that I heard the local legend, which says it is here that some of the Christian knights made their last stand after they lost Jerusalem and which names 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 Renascence expanded into the rationalism of recent centuries, nothing seemed so ridiculous as to butcher and bleed in a distant desert not only for a tomb, but an empty tomb. The last legend of them withered under the wit of Cervantes, though he himself had fought in the last Crusade at Lepanto. They were kicked about like dead donkeys by 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 disgust of Gibbon, more serene than the similar horror with which he 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 a helmet as a tin pot, of every caricaturist on a comic paper who can draw a fat man falling off a bucking horse; of every pushing professional politician who can talk about the superstitions of the Middle Ages. Great men and small have agreed to contemn them; they were renounced by 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 judged finally and forgotten, and they were right. Centuries after their fall the full experience and development of political discovery has shown beyond question that they were right. For there is a very simple test of the truth; that the very thing 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 must rescue some lordship, or overlordship, of these old Roman provinces. Whether it is wise for England alone to claim Palestine, whether it would 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 could be its equal, and especially for the great dream of a mission for 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 very gates 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 could not rule; he was successful and he did not succeed. His baffled and 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 Roman and Byzantine culture. He fell because barbarism cannot stand; because even when it succeeds it rather falls on its foes and crushes them. And after all these things, after all these ages, with a wearier philosophy, with a heavier heart, we have been forced to do again the very thing that the Crusaders were derided for doing. What Western men failed to do for the faith, other Western men have been forced to do even without the faith. The sons of Tancred are again in Tripoli. The heirs of Raymond are again in Syria. And men from the Midlands or the Northumbrian towns went again through 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 shadow on their souls; they crossed dark and disastrous fields whose fame had been hidden from them, and avenged the fathers they had forgotten. And the most cynical of modern diplomatists, making their settlement by the most sceptical of modern philosophies, can find no practical or even temporary solution for this sacred land, except to bring it again under the crown of Coeur de Lion and the cross of St. George.
There came in through the crooked entry beside the great gap in the wall a tall soldier, dismounting and walking and wearing only the dust-hued habit of modern war. There went no trumpet before him, neither did he enter by the Golden Gate; but the silence of the deserts was full of a phantom acclamation, as when from far away a wind brings in a whisper the cheering of many thousand men. For in that hour a long-lost cry found fulfilment, and something counted irrational returned in the reason of things. And at last even the wise understood, and at last even the learned were enlightened on a need truly and indeed international, which a mob in a darker age had known by the light of nature; something that could be denied and delayed and evaded, but not escaped for ever. Id Deus vult.
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Ma tutta questa storia è stata occultata da un pregiudizio più generale del caso particolare dei Saraceni e dei Crociati. Il pregiudizio moderno, o piuttosto vittoriano, contro i Crociati è assoluto e non relativo; e ancora desidererebbe condannare Tancredi anche se non potesse assolvere Saladino. In verità è un pregiudizio non tanto contro i Crociati quanto contro i Cristiani. Non concede a questi eroi della guerra di religione la giusta misura che concede agli eroi dell’ordinaria guerra patriottica e imperiale. Non vi fu mai eroe più nobile di Nelson, né più nazionale o più normale. Eppure Nelson fece con quasi assoluta certezza ciò che Tancredi con quasi assoluta certezza non fece: venne meno alla propria parola consegnando all’esecuzione i propri prodi nemici. Se la causa di Nelson in altri tempi verrà trattata come la fede di Tancredi è stata spesso trattata in tempi recenti, questo solo episodio basterà da solo a dimostrare non soltanto che Nelson era un bugiardo e un mascalzone, ma che non amava affatto l’Inghilterra, che non amava affatto Lady Hamilton, che navigava su navi inglesi solo per intascare il denaro delle prede delle navi francesi, e che avrebbe navigato altrettanto volentieri su navi francesi per il denaro delle prede delle navi inglesi. È questa la sorta di opaca polvere d’oro che è stata scossa come la polvere errante del deserto sopra le spade e le reliquie, le croci e le mani giunte degli uomini che marciarono verso Gerusalemme o morirono a Hattin. In questi pellegrini medievali ogni incoerenza è un’ipocrisia; mentre nei patrioti più moderni perfino un’infamia è soltanto un’incoerenza. Ho arrotondato qui la storia con la rovina di Hattin perché tutta la reazione contro il pellegrinaggio ebbe là la sua origine; e perché fu almeno questo a far perdere infine Gerusalemme. Altrove in Palestina, per non parlare dell’Africa e della Spagna, splendidi contrattacchi venivano ancora sferrati dall’Occidente, non ultimo lo splendido soccorso di Riccardo d’Inghilterra. Ma penso ancora che col solo nome di quella minuscola città sulle colline la nota dell’intera rivoluzione umana fosse stata suonata, mutata e ridotta al silenzio. Tutti gli altri nomi erano soltanto nomi di città orientali; ma quello era più vicino a un uomo dei suoi stessi vicini; un villaggio dentro il suo villaggio, una casa dentro la sua casa.
C’è un colle sopra Betlemme di strana forma, con una sommità piatta che lo fa sembrare stranamente un’isola, abitabile benché disabitata, mentre tutto il Moab ondeggia intorno a esso e oltre esso come con le curve e i colori di un mare. La sua stabilità suggerisce in qualche strano modo ciò che spesso si può avvertire in queste terre dal più lungo retaggio di cultura: che possa esservi non soltanto una civiltà ma perfino una cavalleria più antica della storia. Forse l’altopiano dalla sommità rotonda serba una romantica reminiscenza di una tavola rotonda. Forse è solo un fantastico effetto della sera, poiché lo si avverte soprattutto quando i bassi cieli nuotano nei colori del tramonto, e nelle ombre le rocce infrante attorno alla sua base assumono le forme di titanici paladini che combattono e cadono intorno a esso. So soltanto che la mera forma del colle e la veduta del paesaggio suggerivano tali visioni, e fu solo in seguito che udii la leggenda locale, la quale dice che è qui che alcuni dei cavalieri cristiani fecero la loro ultima resistenza dopo aver perduto Gerusalemme e che chiama questa altura la Montagna dei Latini.
Caddero, e le età rotolarono su di loro le rocce dello scherno; furono sepolti in facezie e buffonerie. Man mano che il Rinascimento si espandeva nel razionalismo dei secoli recenti, nulla sembrava tanto ridicolo quanto scannarsi e sanguinare in un lontano deserto non solo per un sepolcro, ma per un sepolcro vuoto. L’ultima leggenda che li riguardava avvizzì sotto l’arguzia di Cervantes, benché egli stesso avesse combattuto nell’ultima Crociata a Lepanto. Furono presi a calci come asini morti dalla fredda vivacità di Voltaire, il quale se ne andò, assai simbolicamente, a far la corte al nuovo sergente istruttore dei Prussiani. Furono dissezionati come strane bestie dal sereno disgusto di Gibbon, più sereno dell’analogo orrore con cui egli guardava all’analoga violenza della Rivoluzione francese. Al nostro stesso tempo perfino la sfrontatezza è divenuta un luogo comune. Sono da tempo il bersaglio di ogni imbrattacarte da quattro soldi capace di parlare di un elmo come di un pentolino di latta, di ogni caricaturista di un giornale comico capace di disegnare un grassone che cade da un cavallo impennato; di ogni arrivista politico di professione capace di parlare delle superstizioni del Medioevo. Grandi uomini e piccoli si sono trovati d’accordo nel disprezzarli; furono rinnegati dai loro figli e confutati dai loro biografi; furono smascherati, furono fatti a pezzi, furono derisi ed ebbero ragione.
Furono giudicati errati, ed ebbero ragione. Furono giudicati definitivamente e dimenticati, ed ebbero ragione. Secoli dopo la loro caduta la piena esperienza e lo sviluppo della scoperta politica hanno mostrato oltre ogni dubbio che avevano ragione. Poiché esiste una prova assai semplice della verità: che proprio la cosa che fu liquidata come un sogno delle età della fede, siamo stati costretti a mutarla in un fatto nelle età del fatto. È ora più certo che mai che l’Europa deve strappare qualche signoria, o sovrasignoria, di queste antiche province romane. Se sia saggio che l’Inghilterra da sola rivendichi la Palestina, se sarebbe meglio che l’Intesa potesse farlo, ritengo sia una questione seria. Ma in qualche forma stanno tornando all’Impero romano. Ogni opportunità è stata concessa a qualsiasi altro impero che potesse esserne l’eguale, e specialmente al grande sogno di una missione per un Islam imperiale. Se mai un essere umano ebbe la sua occasione fino in fondo, fu il Sultano dei Musulmani in sella al suo destriero arabo. Il suo impero si dilatò sopra e oltre il grande impero greco di Bisanzio; un’ultima carica della cavalleria di Polonia lo arrestò a stento alle porte stesse di Vienna. Fu libero di dispiegare tutto ciò che era in lui, e dispiegò la morte che era in lui. Regnò e non seppe governare; ebbe successo e non riuscì. I suoi nemici sconfitti e in ritirata lo lasciarono in piedi, ed egli non seppe reggersi. Cadde infine con quell’altra potenza semipagana del Nord, con la quale aveva stretto un’alleanza contro i resti della cultura romana e bizantina. Cadde perché la barbarie non può reggersi; perché anche quando trionfa piuttosto piomba sui suoi nemici e li schiaccia. E dopo tutte queste cose, dopo tutte queste età, con una più stanca filosofia, con un cuore più greve, siamo stati costretti a fare di nuovo proprio la cosa per cui i Crociati furono derisi. Ciò che gli uomini d’Occidente non riuscirono a fare per la fede, altri uomini d’Occidente sono stati costretti a farlo perfino senza la fede. I figli di Tancredi sono di nuovo a Tripoli. Gli eredi di Raimondo sono di nuovo in Siria. E uomini delle Midlands o delle città della Northumbria attraversarono di nuovo una fornace di sete e di febbre e di feroce combattimento, per conquistare gli stessi corsi d’acqua e assediare le stesse città di un tempo. Calcarono le colline della Galilea e i Corni di Hattin non gettarono alcuna ombra sulle loro anime; attraversarono campi oscuri e disastrosi la cui fama era stata loro celata, e vendicarono i padri che avevano dimenticato. E il più cinico dei diplomatici moderni, stipulando la propria intesa secondo la più scettica delle filosofie moderne, non riesce a trovare per questa terra sacra alcuna soluzione pratica o anche solo temporanea, se non quella di ricondurla di nuovo sotto la corona di Coeur de Lion e la croce di San Giorgio.
Entrò attraverso il tortuoso passaggio accanto al grande varco nelle mura un alto soldato, che smontava e camminava indossando soltanto la divisa color polvere della guerra moderna. Nessuna tromba lo precedeva, né egli entrò dalla Porta d’Oro; ma il silenzio dei deserti era colmo di una spettrale acclamazione, come quando da lontano un vento reca in un sussurro l’acclamare di molte migliaia di uomini. Poiché in quell’ora un grido a lungo perduto trovò compimento, e qualcosa ritenuto irrazionale ritornò nella ragione delle cose. E infine perfino i saggi compresero, e infine perfino i dotti furono illuminati su un bisogno veramente e realmente internazionale, che una folla in un’età più oscura aveva conosciuto alla luce della natura; qualcosa che poteva essere negato e differito ed eluso, ma non sfuggito per sempre. Id Deus vult.
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CHAPTER XIII
THE PROBLEM OF ZIONISM
There is an attitude for which my friends and I were for a long period rebuked and even reviled; and of which at the present period we are less likely than ever to repent. It was always called Anti-Semitism; but it was always much more true to call it Zionism. At any rate it 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 consisted entirely in saying that Jews are Jews; and as a logical consequence that they are not Russians or Roumanians or Italians or Frenchmen or Englishmen. During the war the newspapers commonly referred to them as Russians; but the ritual wore so singularly thin that I remember one newspaper paragraph saying that the Russians in the East End complained of the food regulations, because their religion forbade them to eat pork. My own brief contact with the Greek priests of the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem did not permit me to discover any trace of this detail of their discipline; and even the Russian pilgrims were said to be equally negligent in the matter. The point for the moment, however, is that if I was violently opposed to 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 dignity and status of a separate nation. We desired that in some fashion, and so far as possible, Jews should be represented by Jews, should live in 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 more rational 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 discussed everywhere as a fact; and one of the most menacing facts of the age. I have lived to see people who accused me of Anti-Semitism become 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 them at all. But, above all, I have seen with my own eyes wild mobs marching 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 had been 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 English pedantry bring us within an inch of an enormous English peril. The first was when all the Victorian historians and philosophers had told us that our German cousin was a cousin german and 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 few short years, English politicians and journalists have discovered the dreadful revenge of reality. To pretend that something is what it is 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 always abruptly punish and pulverise us, merely by being what it is. For years we were told that the Germans were a sort of Englishman because they were Teutons; but it was all the worse for us when we found out what Teutons really were. For years we were told that Jews were 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 people a new friend whom they instantly recognise as an old enemy. It is an absurd position because it is a false position; but it is merely the penalty of falsehood.
Whether this Eastern anger is reasonable or not may be discussed in a moment; but what is utterly unreasonable is not the anger but the 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 as an 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 logic of purely English supremacy and, impartiality; and not by what seems to everybody in Palestine a monstrous muddle of the two. But of course it is not only the peril in Palestine that has made the realisation of the Jewish problem, which once suffered all the dangers of a fad, suffer the opposite dangers of a fashion. The same journalists who politely describe Jews as Russians are now very impolitely describing certain Russians who are Jews. Many who had no particular objection to Jews as Capitalists have a very great objection to them as Bolshevists. Those who had an innocent unconsciousness of the nationality of Eckstein, even when he called himself Eckstein, have managed to discover the 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 with the new Anti-Semitism which is merely Anti-Socialism. There are good, honourable and magnanimous Jews of every type and rank, there are many to 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 among different types of Jews, I have much more sympathy with the Jew who 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 respect for 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 head of 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 actions are violent, but because its very thought is materialistic and mean. And if this preference is true even of Bolshevism, it is ten times truer of Zionism. It really seems to me rather hard that the full storm of fury should have burst about the Jews, at the very moment when 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 sincerity for their own.
CAPITOLO XIII
IL PROBLEMA DEL SIONISMO
Vi è un atteggiamento per il quale i miei amici ed io fummo a lungo rimproverati e persino vilipesi; e del quale nel momento presente siamo meno che mai propensi a pentirci. Fu sempre chiamato antisemitismo; ma sarebbe stato sempre assai più vero chiamarlo sionismo. In ogni caso era assai più vicino alla natura della cosa chiamarlo sionismo, riesca o no a trovare la sua concentrazione geografica in Sion. La sostanza di questa eresia era estremamente semplice. Consisteva interamente nel dire che gli ebrei sono ebrei; e come logica conseguenza che non sono russi né rumeni né italiani né francesi né inglesi. Durante la guerra i giornali comunemente li chiamavano russi; ma il rituale era così singolarmente trasparente che ricordo il capoverso di un giornale il quale diceva che i russi dell’East End si lamentavano dei regolamenti annonari, perché la loro religione proibiva loro di mangiare carne di maiale. Il mio breve contatto con i sacerdoti greci della Chiesa ortodossa a Gerusalemme non mi permise di scoprire alcuna traccia di questo particolare della loro disciplina; e anche i pellegrini russi si diceva fossero ugualmente noncuranti in materia. Il punto, per il momento, è tuttavia che se ero violentemente contrario a qualcosa, non erano gli ebrei, ma quella sorta di osservazione sugli ebrei; o piuttosto la sciocca e vile paura di farne un’osservazione sugli ebrei. Ma i miei amici ed io avevamo in qualche senso generale una linea politica in materia; ed essa era in sostanza il desiderio di dare agli ebrei la dignità e lo status di una nazione separata. Desideravamo che in qualche modo, e per quanto possibile, gli ebrei fossero rappresentati da ebrei, vivessero in una società di ebrei, fossero giudicati da ebrei e governati da ebrei. Sono un antisemita, se questo è antisemitismo. Sembrerebbe più razionale chiamarlo semitismo.
Di questo atteggiamento, ripeto, ora sono meno che mai propenso a pentirmi. Ho vissuto abbastanza da vedere la cosa che fu liquidata come una fisima discussa ovunque come un fatto; e uno dei fatti più minacciosi dell’epoca. Ho vissuto abbastanza da vedere persone che mi accusavano di antisemitismo divenire assai più antisemite di quanto io sia o sia mai stato. Ho udito persone parlare con vera ingiustizia degli ebrei, le quali un tempo parevano ritenere un’ingiustizia parlarne affatto. Ma, soprattutto, ho visto con i miei stessi occhi folle inferocite marciare attraverso una grande città, inveendo non solo contro gli ebrei, ma contro gli inglesi per essersi identificati con gli ebrei. Ho visto l’intero prestigio dell’Inghilterra messo a repentaglio, per il solo espediente di parlare di due nazioni come se fossero una sola. Ho visto un inglese giungere a Gerusalemme con qualcuno che gli era stato insegnato a considerare suo connazionale e collega politico, ed essere accolto come se fosse venuto a braccetto con un drago fiammeggiante. Così se la passano le nostre gelide finzioni quando finiscono sotto quel sole ardente.
Due volte nella mia vita, e due volte di recente, ho visto un tratto di pedanteria inglese portarci a un pollice da un enorme pericolo inglese. La prima fu quando tutti gli storici e i filosofi vittoriani ci avevano detto che il nostro cugino tedesco era un cugino germano e persino congeniale; qualcosa di naturalmente vicino e affine. Anche quella era un’identificazione; anche quella era un’assimilazione; anche quella era un’unione dei cuori. Per la seconda volta in pochi brevi anni, i politici e i giornalisti inglesi hanno scoperto la terribile vendetta della realtà. Fingere che una cosa sia ciò che non è è un affare che può facilmente essere di moda e talvolta popolare. Ma la cosa che abbiamo convenuto di considerare come ciò che non è ci punirà e ci polverizzerà sempre bruscamente, semplicemente essendo ciò che è. Per anni ci fu detto che i tedeschi erano una sorta di inglesi perché erano teutoni; ma fu tanto peggio per noi quando scoprimmo cosa fossero davvero i teutoni. Per anni ci fu detto che gli ebrei erano una sorta di inglesi perché erano sudditi britannici. È tanto peggio per noi ora che dobbiamo considerarli, non soggettivamente come sudditi, ma oggettivamente come oggetti; come oggetti di un feroce odio fra i musulmani e i greci. Siamo nell’assurda posizione di presentare a questa gente un nuovo amico che essi riconoscono all’istante come un vecchio nemico. È una posizione assurda perché è una posizione falsa; ma è semplicemente la pena della falsità.
Se questa collera orientale sia ragionevole o no potrà discutersi tra un momento; ma ciò che è del tutto irragionevole non è la collera bensì lo stupore; o almeno il nostro stupore per il loro stupore. Noi potevamo credere alla tesi che un ebreo sia un inglese; ma non vi era ragione per cui essi dovessero considerarlo un inglese, dal momento che già lo riconoscevano come un ebreo. Questo è l’intero problema attuale dell’ebreo in Palestina; e va risolto o con la logica del sionismo o con la logica di una supremazia e imparzialità puramente inglese; e non con quello che sembra a chiunque in Palestina un mostruoso pasticcio dei due. Ma naturalmente non è soltanto il pericolo in Palestina ad aver fatto sì che la presa di coscienza del problema ebraico, che un tempo soffrì tutti i rischi di una fisima, soffra ora i rischi opposti di una moda. Gli stessi giornalisti che educatamente descrivono gli ebrei come russi ora descrivono assai maleducatamente certi russi che sono ebrei. Molti che non avevano particolare obiezione contro gli ebrei come capitalisti hanno una grandissima obiezione contro di loro come bolscevichi. Coloro che avevano un’innocente inconsapevolezza della nazionalità di Eckstein, anche quando egli si faceva chiamare Eckstein, sono riusciti a scoprire la nazionalità di Braunstein, anche quando egli si fa chiamare Trockij. E anche molto di questo pericolo si sarebbe potuto facilmente attenuare con la semplice proposta di chiamare gli uomini e le cose col loro nome.
Confesserò, tuttavia, di non avere alcuna piena simpatia per il nuovo antisemitismo che è meramente antisocialismo. Vi sono ebrei buoni, onorevoli e magnanimi di ogni tipo e rango, ve ne sono molti ai quali sono grandemente affezionato tra i miei stessi amici del mio stesso rango; ma se devo compiere una scelta generale, in una generale eventualità, tra i diversi tipi di ebrei, ho assai più simpatia per l’ebreo rivoluzionario che per l’ebreo plutocratico. In altre parole, ho assai più simpatia per l’israelita che cominciamo a respingere che per l’israelita che abbiamo già accolto. Ho più rispetto per lui quando guida una qualche sorta di rivolta, per quanto angusta e anarchica, contro l’oppressione dei poveri, che quando è al sicuro a capo di una grande impresa di prestito a usura opprimendo egli stesso i poveri. Non sono i poveri stranieri, ma i ricchi stranieri che avrei voluto escludere. Io stesso respingo interamente il bolscevismo, non perché le sue azioni siano violente, ma perché il suo stesso pensiero è materialistico e meschino. E se questa preferenza è vera perfino del bolscevismo, è dieci volte più vera del sionismo. Mi pare davvero piuttosto duro che l’intera tempesta di furore sia scoppiata attorno agli ebrei, proprio nel momento in cui almeno alcuni di loro hanno sentito il richiamo di un ideale assai più puro; e che, dopo aver tollerato i loro trucchi con il nostro paese, ci si rivolti contro di loro proprio quando cercano con sincerità il proprio.
But in order to judge this Jewish possibility, we must understand more fully the nature of the Jewish problem. We must consider it from the start, because there are still many who do not know that there 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 describing him as a man of the East; but in truth another very real injustice may be involved in treating him as a man of the West. Very often even the joke against the Jew is rather a joke against those who have made the joke; that is, a joke against what they have 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 about the Hebrew habit of putting on a top-hat as an act of worship. It is vaguely mixed up with another line of humour, about another class of Jew, who wears a large number of hats; and who must not therefore 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 something inevitably fantastic about this formality of the synagogue. But we ought to remember that we have made the Western conditions which startle the Western eyes. It seems odd to wear a modern top-hat as if it were a mitre or a biretta; it seems quainter still when the hat is 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 helps himself to a hat as a sort of hors d’oeuvre. All this could easily be turned into a joke; but we ought to realise that the joke is against ourselves. It is not merely we who make fun of it, but we who have made it funny. For, after all, nobody can pretend that this particular type of head-dress is a part of that uncouth 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 utensils dedicated to the obscure service of the Ark; nobody can suppose that a top-hat descended from heaven among the wings and wheels of the flying visions of the Prophets. For this wild vision the West is entirely responsible. Europe has created the Tower of Giotto; but it has also created the topper. We of the West must bear the 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 Hebrew ritual seem ridiculous. Performed in the old original Hebrew fashion it is not ridiculous, but rather if anything sublime. For the original fashion was an oriental fashion; and the Jews are orientals; and the mark of all such orientals is the wearing of long and loose draperies. To throw those loose draperies over the head is decidedly a dignified and even poetic gesture. One can imagine something like justice done to its majesty and mystery in one of the great dark drawings of William Blake. It may be true, and personally I think it is true, that the Hebrew covering of the head signifies a certain stress on the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom, while the Christian uncovering of 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 that would point to the same conclusion. A number of points upon which the unfortunate alien is blamed would be much improved if 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 vulgarity in clothes, and especially the colours of clothes, with which a certain sort of Jews brighten the landscape or seascape at Margate or many holiday resorts. When we see a foreign gentleman on Brighton Pier wearing yellow spats, a magenta waistcoat, and an emerald green tie, we feel that he has somehow missed certain fine shades of social sensibility and fitness. It might considerably surprise the company on Brighton Pier, if he were to reply by solemnly unwinding his green necktie from round his neck, and winding it round his head. Yet the reply would be the right one; and would be equally logical and artistic. As soon as the green tie had become a green turban, it might look as appropriate and even attractive as the green turban of any pilgrim of Mecca or any descendant of Mahomet, who walks with a stately air through the streets of Jaffa or Jerusalem. The bright colours that make the Margate Jews hideous are no brighter than those that make the Moslem crowd picturesque. They are only worn in the wrong place, in the wrong way, and in conjunction with a type and 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 have often 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 any political or social position which he can gain in open competition; let us not listen for a moment to any suggestions of reactionary restrictions or racial privilege. Let a Jew be Lord Chief justice, if his exceptional veracity and reliability have clearly marked him out for that post. Let a Jew be Archbishop of Canterbury, if our national religion has attained to that receptive breadth that would render such a transition unobjectionable and 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 with the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons in Parliament 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 there dressed as an Arab. It is not my point at present to dwell on the pleasing if flippant fancy of how much this would transform the political scene; of the dapper figure of Sir Herbert Samuel swathed as a Bedouin, or Sir Alfred Mond gaining a yet greater grandeur from the gorgeous and trailing robes of the East. If my image is quaint my intention is quite serious; and the point of it is not personal to any particular Jew. The point applies to 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 know where he is, which is in a foreign land.
Ma per giudicare questa possibilità ebraica, dobbiamo comprendere più pienamente la natura del problema ebraico. Dobbiamo considerarlo dall’inizio, perché vi sono ancora molti che non sanno che esiste un problema ebraico. Quel problema ha la sua prova, s’intende, nella storia dell’ebreo, e nel fatto che egli venne dall’Oriente. Un ebreo talvolta si lamenta dell’ingiustizia di descriverlo come un uomo d’Oriente; ma in verità un’altra ingiustizia assai reale può annidarsi nel trattarlo come un uomo d’Occidente. Assai spesso perfino la beffa contro l’ebreo è piuttosto una beffa contro coloro che l’hanno fatta; vale a dire, una beffa contro ciò che essi hanno fatto dell’ebreo. Questo è vero specialmente, per esempio, di molti punti di religione e di rituale. Così non possiamo fare a meno di avvertire, per esempio, che vi è qualcosa di un po’ grottesco nell’abitudine ebraica di mettersi un cilindro come atto di culto. La cosa si confonde vagamente con un’altra linea di umorismo, relativa a un’altra classe di ebrei, che porta un gran numero di cappelli; e al quale non si deve perciò attribuire uno zelo religioso estremo o stravagante, che lo spinga a innalzare al cielo una pagoda di cappelli. Agli occhi occidentali, in condizioni occidentali, vi è davvero qualcosa di inevitabilmente fantastico in questa formalità della sinagoga. Ma dovremmo ricordare che siamo noi ad aver creato le condizioni occidentali che sconcertano gli occhi occidentali. Sembra strano portare un moderno cilindro come se fosse una mitra o una berretta; sembra ancor più bizzarro quando il cappello è indossato anche solo per lo scopo momentaneo di rendere grazie prima del pranzo. Sembra bizzarrissimo di tutto quando, in certi pranzi ebraici, un vassoio di cappelli viene fatto realmente girare, e ogni convitato si serve di un cappello come di una sorta di hors d’oeuvre. Tutto ciò potrebbe facilmente essere volto in scherzo; ma dovremmo renderci conto che lo scherzo è contro noi stessi. Non siamo semplicemente noi a farne beffa, ma noi che l’abbiamo reso ridicolo. Poiché, dopo tutto, nessuno può pretendere che questo particolare tipo di copricapo faccia parte di quella rozza iconografia «che sfida la pittura e la scultura» che Renan notava nella tradizione della civiltà ebraica. Nessuno può dire che un cilindro fosse tra gli strani utensili simbolici consacrati all’oscuro servizio dell’Arca; nessuno può supporre che un cilindro discendesse dal cielo tra le ali e le ruote delle visioni volanti dei Profeti. Di questa selvaggia visione l’Occidente è interamente responsabile. L’Europa ha creato la Torre di Giotto; ma ha creato anche il cilindro. Noi d’Occidente dobbiamo portare il fardello, come meglio possiamo, tanto della responsabilità quanto del cappello. È unicamente il tipo e la forma particolare del cappello a rendere ridicolo il rituale ebraico. Compiuto all’antica maniera ebraica originaria non è ridicolo, ma anzi semmai sublime. Poiché la maniera originaria era una maniera orientale; e gli ebrei sono orientali; e il segno di tutti questi orientali è il portare lunghi e ampi drappeggi. Gettare quegli ampi drappeggi sul capo è decisamente un gesto dignitoso e persino poetico. Si può immaginare qualcosa come giustizia resa alla sua maestà e al suo mistero in uno dei grandi cupi disegni di William Blake. Può essere vero, e personalmente credo che sia vero, che il coprirsi ebraico del capo significhi un certo accento sul timore di Dio, che è il principio della sapienza, mentre lo scoprirsi cristiano del capo suggerisce piuttosto l’amore di Dio che è il fine della sapienza. Ma questo nulla ha a che fare con il gusto e la dignità della cerimonia; e per rendere loro giustizia dobbiamo trattare l’ebreo come un orientale; dobbiamo perfino vestirlo come un orientale.
Ho preso questo soltanto come un esempio operativo tra i molti che condurrebbero alla medesima conclusione. Un certo numero di punti sui quali lo sventurato straniero è biasimato migliorerebbero assai s’egli fosse, non meno straniero, ma anzi più straniero. Essi nascono dal suo essere troppo simile a noi, e troppo poco simile a se stesso. È evidentemente il caso, per esempio, per quella vivida volgarità nel vestire, e specialmente nei colori del vestire, con cui una certa sorta di ebrei ravviva il paesaggio o il panorama marino a Margate o in molte località di villeggiatura. Quando vediamo un signore straniero sul Molo di Brighton che indossa ghette gialle, un panciotto color magenta e una cravatta verde smeraldo, sentiamo che gli sono in qualche modo sfuggite certe fini sfumature di sensibilità e di convenienza sociale. Potrebbe considerevolmente sorprendere la compagnia sul Molo di Brighton s’egli replicasse svolgendosi solennemente la cravatta verde dal collo e avvolgendosela intorno al capo. Eppure la replica sarebbe quella giusta; e sarebbe ugualmente logica e artistica. Non appena la cravatta verde fosse divenuta un turbante verde, potrebbe apparire tanto appropriata e persino attraente quanto il turbante verde di un qualsiasi pellegrino della Mecca o di un qualsiasi discendente di Maometto, che cammina con aria maestosa per le vie di Giaffa o di Gerusalemme. I colori vivaci che rendono orridi gli ebrei di Margate non sono più vivaci di quelli che rendono pittoresca la folla musulmana. Sono soltanto indossati nel posto sbagliato, nel modo sbagliato, e in congiunzione con un tipo e un taglio di abito che è concepito per essere più sobrio e contenuto. Poco si può davvero addurre contro di lui, sotto questo rispetto, se non che il suo istinto artistico è più per il colore che per la forma, specialmente del genere che noi stessi abbiamo etichettato come buona forma.
Questo è un mero simbolo, ma è un simbolo tanto adatto che l’ho spesso offerto simbolicamente come soluzione del problema ebraico. Mi sono sentito disposto a dire: rimanga in piedi ogni legislazione liberale, rimanga in piedi ogni uguaglianza civile letterale e legale; occupi pure l’ebreo qualsiasi posizione politica o sociale che possa conquistare in aperta competizione; non prestiamo per un istante ascolto ad alcun suggerimento di restrizioni reazionarie o di privilegio razziale. Sia pure l’ebreo Lord Chief Justice, se la sua eccezionale veridicità e affidabilità l’hanno chiaramente designato per quella carica. Sia pure l’ebreo Arcivescovo di Canterbury, se la nostra religione nazionale ha raggiunto quell’ampiezza ricettiva che renderebbe una tale transizione ineccepibile e persino inconsapevole. Ma vi sia una sola legge d’articolo unico; una sola legge semplice e travolgente sugli ebrei, e nessun’altra. Sia sancito, dalla Maestà Eccellentissima del Re, per mezzo e con il consiglio dei Lord Spirituali e Temporali e dei Comuni riuniti in Parlamento, che ogni ebreo debba essere vestito come un arabo. Segga pure sul Woolsack, ma vi segga vestito come un arabo. Predichi pure nella Cattedrale di San Paolo, ma vi predichi vestito come un arabo. Non è mio scopo, al momento, indugiare sulla piacevole se pur frivola fantasia di quanto ciò trasformerebbe la scena politica; della figura elegante di Sir Herbert Samuel avvolto come un beduino, o di Sir Alfred Mond che acquisterebbe una grandezza ancor maggiore dalle sontuose e strascicanti vesti dell’Oriente. Se la mia immagine è bizzarra, la mia intenzione è del tutto seria; e il suo punto non è personale ad alcun ebreo particolare. Il punto vale per qualsiasi ebreo, e per il nostro stesso recupero di più sane relazioni con lui. Il punto è che dovremmo sapere dove siamo; ed egli saprebbe dove è, ossia in terra straniera.
This is but a parenthesis and a parable, but it brings us to the concrete controversial matter which is the Jewish problem. Only a few years ago it was regarded as a mark of a blood-thirsty disposition to admit that the Jewish problem was a problem, or even that the Jew was a Jew. Through much misunderstanding certain friends of mine and myself have persisted in disregarding the silence thus imposed; but facts have fought for us more effectively than words. By this time nobody is more conscious of the Jewish problem than the most intelligent and idealistic of the Jews. The folly of 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 fiction falsified the relations of everybody and everything, it is enough to note that it involved the Jews themselves in a quite new and quite needless unpopularity in the first years of the war. A poor little Jewish tailor, who called himself by a German name merely because he lived for a short time in a German town, was instantly mobbed 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 pair of shears. It was very unjust; quite as unjust as it would be to ask Bethmann-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 led him to call himself Bernstein when his name was Benjamin.
In such cases the Jews are accused of all sorts of faults they have not got; but there are faults that they have got. Some of the charges against them, as in the cases I have quoted concerning religious ritual and artistic taste, are due merely to the false light in which they are regarded. Other faults may also be due to the false position in which they are placed. But the faults exist; and nothing was ever more dangerous to everybody concerned than the recent fashion of denying or ignoring them. It was done simply by the snobbish habit of suppressing the experience and evidence of the majority of people, and especially of the majority of poor people. It was done by confining the controversy to a small world of wealth and refinement, remote from all the real facts involved. For the rich are the most ignorant people on earth, and the best that can be said for them, in cases like these, is that their ignorance often reaches the point of innocence.
I will take a typical case, which sums up the whole of this absurd fashion. There was a controversy in the columns of an important daily paper, some time ago, on the subject of the character of Shylock in Shakespeare. Actors and authors of 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 prejudices of his time from having a complete sympathy with Shylock. Some said that Shakespeare was only restrained by fear of the powers of his time from expressing his complete sympathy with Shylock. Some wondered how or why Shakespeare had got hold of such a queer story as that of the pound of flesh, and what it could possibly have to do with so dignified and intellectual a character as Shylock. In short, some wondered why a man of genius should be so much of an Anti-Semite, and some stoutly declared that he must have been a Pro-Semite. But all of them in a sense admitted that 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 human being even so much as mentioned the word “usury.” It is exactly as if twenty clever critics were set down to talk for a month about the play of Macbeth, and were all strictly forbidden to mention the 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 fashion to say that it is a clumsy and grotesque story; but as a fact it is an exceedingly good story. It is a perfect and pointed story for its purpose, which is to convey the moral of the story. And the moral 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 a man’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 very sound medieval laws, which set a limit on the usurer who was trying to take away a man’s livelihood, as the usurer in the play is trying to take away a man’s life. And if anybody thinks that usury can never 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 victims of money-lenders, or else one of the more powerful and influential rich who are money-lenders themselves.
All this, I say, is a fact that must be faced, but there is another side to 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 attempt to understand Shylock; in the true sense to sympathise with Shylock the money-lender, as he sympathised with Macbeth the murderer. It was not to deny that the man was an usurer, but to assert that the usurer was a man. And the Elizabethan dramatist does make him a man, where the medieval satirist made him a monster. Shakespeare not only makes him a man but a perfectly sincere 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 himself for 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 a rough and ready way. Regarding the Jew in relation to his ideas about 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 is to deny the disease.
Questa non è che una parentesi e una parabola, ma ci conduce alla concreta materia controversa che è il problema ebraico. Solo pochi anni fa era considerato un segno di indole sanguinaria ammettere che il problema ebraico fosse un problema, o anche solo che l’ebreo fosse un ebreo. Attraverso molti fraintendimenti certi miei amici ed io abbiamo perseverato nel non curarci del silenzio così imposto; ma i fatti hanno combattuto per noi più efficacemente delle parole. A questo punto nessuno è più consapevole del problema ebraico dei più intelligenti e idealisti tra gli ebrei. La follia della moda per cui gli ebrei spesso celavano i propri nomi ebraici deve certamente essere ormai manifesta, a questo punto, anche a coloro che li celavano. Per menzionare un solo esempio del modo in cui questa finzione falsificava le relazioni di tutti e di tutto, basti notare che essa coinvolse gli ebrei stessi in un’impopolarità del tutto nuova e del tutto inutile nei primi anni della guerra. Un povero piccolo sarto ebreo, che si faceva chiamare con un nome tedesco solo perché aveva vissuto per breve tempo in una città tedesca, fu all’istante assalito dalla folla a Whitechapel per la sua parte nell’invasione del Belgio. Fu controinterrogato sul perché avesse danneggiato la torre di Reims; e gli si parlava come se avesse ucciso l’infermiera Cavell con le sue stesse forbici. Era assai ingiusto; ingiusto quanto lo sarebbe chiedere a Bethmann-Hollweg perché avesse trafitto Eglon o fatto a pezzi Agag. Ma era almeno in parte colpa dell’ebreo stesso, e di tutta quella politica futile e indegna che l’aveva indotto a chiamarsi Bernstein quando il suo nome era Benjamin.
In tali casi gli ebrei sono accusati di ogni sorta di difetti che non hanno; ma vi sono difetti che hanno davvero. Alcune delle accuse contro di loro, come nei casi che ho citato riguardo al rituale religioso e al gusto artistico, sono dovute meramente alla falsa luce in cui vengono considerati. Altri difetti possono anch’essi essere dovuti alla falsa posizione in cui sono collocati. Ma i difetti esistono; e nulla fu mai più pericoloso per tutti gli interessati della recente moda di negarli o ignorarli. Lo si è fatto semplicemente per la snobistica abitudine di sopprimere l’esperienza e la testimonianza della maggioranza delle persone, e specialmente della maggioranza dei poveri. Lo si è fatto confinando la controversia in un piccolo mondo di ricchezza e raffinatezza, remoto da tutti i fatti reali in gioco. Poiché i ricchi sono le persone più ignoranti sulla terra, e il meglio che si possa dire di loro, in casi come questi, è che la loro ignoranza tocca spesso il punto dell’innocenza.
Prenderò un caso tipico, che riassume tutta questa assurda moda. Vi fu una controversia sulle colonne di un importante quotidiano, qualche tempo fa, sul carattere di Shylock in Shakespeare. Attori e autori di rilievo, compresi alcuni dei più brillanti ebrei viventi, dibatterono la questione dai più svariati punti di vista. Alcuni dicevano che Shakespeare fu impedito dai pregiudizi del suo tempo dall’avere una completa simpatia per Shylock. Alcuni dicevano che Shakespeare fu solo trattenuto dal timore dei poteri del suo tempo dall’esprimere la sua completa simpatia per Shylock. Alcuni si chiedevano come o perché Shakespeare si fosse impadronito di una storia tanto bizzarra quanto quella della libbra di carne, e cosa mai potesse avere a che fare con un personaggio tanto dignitoso e intellettuale come Shylock. In breve, alcuni si chiedevano perché un uomo di genio dovesse essere tanto antisemita, e alcuni dichiaravano risolutamente che dovesse essere stato filosemita. Ma tutti loro in un certo senso ammettevano di essere perplessi su quale fosse l’argomento del dramma. Il carteggio riempì colonna dopo colonna e proseguì per settimane. E da un capo all’altro di quel carteggio, nessun essere umano menzionò nemmeno una sola volta la parola «usura». È esattamente come se venti critici arguti fossero messi a discutere per un mese del dramma Macbeth, e fosse loro rigorosamente proibito di menzionare la parola «assassinio».
Il dramma intitolato Il mercante di Venezia tratta appunto dell’usura, e la sua vicenda è una satira medievale sull’usura. È di moda dire che è una storia goffa e grottesca; ma di fatto è una storia straordinariamente buona. È una storia perfetta e acuminata per il suo scopo, che è quello di trasmettere la morale della storia. E la morale è che la logica dell’usura è per sua natura in guerra con la vita, e potrebbe logicamente finire per irrompere nella sanguinosa casa della vita. In altre parole, se un creditore può sempre reclamare gli strumenti di un uomo o la casa di un uomo, potrebbe altrettanto giustamente reclamarne un braccio o una gamba. Questo principio non solo era incarnato nelle satire medievali ma in leggi medievali assai sagge, che ponevano un limite all’usuraio che cercava di sottrarre a un uomo il sostentamento, come l’usuraio nel dramma cerca di sottrarre a un uomo la vita. E se qualcuno pensa che l’usura non possa mai spingersi a estremi tanto malvagi da meritare un’immagine così sfrenata, allora costui o non ne sa nulla o ne sa troppo. È o uno dei ricchi innocenti che non sono mai stati vittime degli strozzini, oppure uno dei ricchi più potenti e influenti che sono essi stessi strozzini.
Tutto questo, ripeto, è un fatto che va affrontato, ma vi è un altro lato della questione, ed è questo che il genio di Shakespeare scoprì. Ciò che egli fece, e che il satirico medievale non fece, fu il tentativo di comprendere Shylock; in senso vero, di simpatizzare con Shylock l’usuraio, come simpatizzava con Macbeth l’assassino. Non fu negare che l’uomo fosse un usuraio, ma affermare che l’usuraio era un uomo. E il drammaturgo elisabettiano ne fa davvero un uomo, là dove il satirico medievale ne faceva un mostro. Shakespeare non solo ne fa un uomo ma un uomo perfettamente sincero e pieno di amor proprio. Ma il punto è questo: che è un uomo sincero che crede sinceramente nell’usura. È un uomo pieno di rispetto di sé che non disprezza se stesso per essere un usuraio. In una parola, considera l’usura come normale. In quella parola sta l’intero problema dell’impressione popolare degli ebrei. Ciò che Shakespeare suggerì sull’ebreo in modo sottile e comprensivo, milioni di uomini semplici ovunque lo suggerirebbero in modo rozzo e sbrigativo. Considerando l’ebreo in rapporto alle sue idee sull’interesse, essi pensano o che sia semplicemente immorale; oppure che, se è morale, allora ha una diversa moralità. Vi è molto altro da dire su quanto ciò sia vero, e su quali ne siano le cause e le attenuanti se è vero. Ma è una vecchia storia, certamente, che il peggiore di tutti i rimedi è negare la malattia.
To recognise the reality of the Jewish problem is very vital for everybody and especially vital for Jews. To pretend that there is no problem is to precipitate the expression of a rational impatience, which unfortunately can only express itself in the rather irrational form of Anti-Semitism. In the controversies of Palestine and Syria, for instance, it is very common to hear the answer that the Jew is no worse than the Armenian. The Armenian also is said to be unpopular as a money-lender and a mercantile upstart; yet the Armenian figures as 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 seriously suggested that we can substitute the Armenian for the Jew in the study of a world-wide problem like that of the Jews? Could we talk of the competition of Armenians among Welsh shop-keepers, or of the crowd of Armenians on Brighton Parade? Can Armenian usury be a common topic of talk in a camp in California and in a club in Piccadilly? Does Shakespeare show us a tragic Armenian towering over the great Venice of the Renascence? Does Dickens show us a realistic Armenian teaching in the thieves’ kitchens of the slums? When we meet Mr. Vernon Vavasour, that brilliant financier, do we speculate on the probability of his really having an Armenian name to match his Armenian nose? Is it true, in short, that all sorts of people, from the peasants of Poland to the peasants of Portugal, can agree more or less upon the special subject of Armenia? Obviously it is not in the least true; obviously the Armenian question is only a local question of certain Christians, who may be more avaricious than other Christians. But it is the truth about the Jews. It is only half the truth, and one which by itself would be very unjust to the Jews. But it is the truth, and we must realise it as sharply and clearly as we can. The truth is that it is rather strange that the Jews should be so anxious for international agreements. For one of the few really international agreements is a suspicion of the Jews.
A more practical comparison would be one between the Jews and 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 in different 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 largely the cause of Jewish usury or gipsy pilfering; but it is not common sense to contradict the general experience of gipsy pilfering or Jewish usury. The comparison helps us to clear away some of the cloudy evasions by which modern men have tried to escape from that experience. It is absurd to say that people are only prejudiced against the money methods of the Jews because the medieval church has left behind a hatred of their religion. We might as well say that people only protect the chickens from the gipsies because the medieval church undoubtedly condemned fortune-telling. It is unreasonable for a Jew to complain that 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 child as 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 a certain dignity and self-respect among the women of the Romany. But no student ever praised them for an exaggerated respect for private property, and the whole argument about gipsy theft can be roughly repeated about Hebrew usury. Above all, there is one other respect in which the comparison is even more to the point. It is the essential fact of the whole business, that the Jews do not become 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 peoples fails in the presence of the greater problem. Here again even the attempt at a parallel leaves the primary thing more unique. The gipsies do not become municipal merely by passing through a number of parishes, and it would seem equally obvious that a Jew need not become English merely 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 name of 123 Laburnam Road, Clapham. The municipal authorities generally notice the wheels attached to the new cottage, and therefore do not fall 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 made the mayor of an important industrial town must be comparatively rare. And if the poor vagabonds of the Romany blood are bullied by mayors and magistrates, kicked off the land by landlords, pursued by policemen and generally knocked about from pillar to post, nobody raises an outcry that they are the victims of religious persecution; nobody summons meetings in public halls, collects subscriptions or sends petitions to parliament; nobody threatens anybody else with the organised indignation of the gipsies all over the world. The case of the Jew in the nation is very different from that of the tinker in the town. The moral elements that can be appealed to are of a very different style and scale. No gipsies are millionaires.
Riconoscere la realtà del problema ebraico è assai vitale per tutti e specialmente vitale per gli ebrei. Fingere che non vi sia problema significa precipitare l’espressione di una razionale impazienza, la quale purtroppo può esprimersi soltanto nella forma piuttosto irrazionale dell’antisemitismo. Nelle controversie di Palestina e di Siria, per esempio, è assai comune udire la risposta che l’ebreo non è peggiore dell’armeno. Anche l’armeno, si dice, è impopolare come strozzino e come arrampicatore mercantile; eppure l’armeno figura come un martire per la fede cristiana e una vittima della furia musulmana. Ma questo è uno di quegli argomenti che portano in sé la propria risposta. È come la sentenza scettica che l’uomo è soltanto un animale, la quale di per sé provoca la replica: «Che animale!». La somiglianza stessa non fa che sottolineare il contrasto. Si suggerisce seriamente che possiamo sostituire l’armeno all’ebreo nello studio di un problema mondiale come quello degli ebrei? Potremmo parlare della concorrenza degli armeni tra i bottegai gallesi, o della folla di armeni sulla Passeggiata di Brighton? Può l’usura armena essere un comune argomento di discorso in un accampamento in California e in un club a Piccadilly? Shakespeare ci mostra forse un tragico armeno che torreggia sulla grande Venezia del Rinascimento? Dickens ci mostra forse un armeno realistico che insegna nelle cucine dei ladri dei bassifondi? Quando incontriamo il signor Vernon Vavasour, quel brillante finanziere, ci mettiamo forse a speculare sulla probabilità che egli abbia davvero un nome armeno a intonarsi al suo naso armeno? È vero, insomma, che ogni sorta di persone, dai contadini della Polonia ai contadini del Portogallo, possono accordarsi più o meno sullo speciale argomento dell’Armenia? Evidentemente non è affatto vero; evidentemente la questione armena è soltanto una questione locale di certi cristiani, che possono essere più avidi di altri cristiani. Ma quanto agli ebrei è la verità. È solo metà della verità, e una che da sola sarebbe assai ingiusta verso gli ebrei. Ma è la verità, e dobbiamo coglierla con quanta più nettezza e chiarezza possiamo. La verità è che è piuttosto strano che gli ebrei siano tanto ansiosi di accordi internazionali. Poiché uno dei pochi accordi davvero internazionali è una diffidenza verso gli ebrei.
Un confronto più pratico sarebbe quello tra gli ebrei e gli zingari; poiché questi ultimi almeno coprono più paesi, e possono essere saggiati dalle impressioni di regioni assai diverse. E sotto alcuni rispetti preliminari il confronto è davvero utile. Entrambe le razze sono in modi diversi senza terra, e perciò in modi diversi senza legge. Poiché le leggi fondamentali sono leggi della terra. In entrambi i casi un uomo ragionevole vedrà ragioni d’impopolarità, senza voler indulgere ad alcuna smania di persecuzione. In entrambi i casi egli riconoscerà probabilmente la realtà di una colpa razziale, pur ammettendo che essa possa essere in gran parte una sventura razziale. Vale a dire, la condizione errante e sradicata può essere in gran parte la causa dell’usura ebraica o del furtarello zingaro; ma non è buon senso contraddire l’esperienza generale del furtarello zingaro o dell’usura ebraica. Il confronto ci aiuta a spazzar via alcune delle nebbiose evasioni con cui gli uomini moderni hanno cercato di sfuggire a quell’esperienza. È assurdo dire che la gente ha pregiudizi contro i metodi finanziari degli ebrei soltanto perché la chiesa medievale ha lasciato dietro di sé un odio per la loro religione. Potremmo altrettanto bene dire che la gente protegge i polli dagli zingari soltanto perché la chiesa medievale condannò indubbiamente la lettura della ventura. È irragionevole che un ebreo si lamenti che Shakespeare faccia di Shylock e non di Antonio lo spietato strozzino; o che Dickens faccia di Fagin e non di Sikes il ricettatore di refurtiva. È come se uno zingaro si lamentasse quando un romanziere descrive un bambino come rubato dagli zingari, e non dal curato o dall’adunanza delle madri. Significa lamentarsi di fatti e di probabilità. Vi possono essere zingari buoni; vi possono essere buone qualità che appartengono loro specialmente in quanto zingari; molti studiosi di questa strana razza hanno, per esempio, lodato una certa dignità e un certo rispetto di sé fra le donne dei Rom. Ma nessuno studioso li ha mai lodati per un esagerato rispetto della proprietà privata, e l’intero argomento sul furto zingaro può grosso modo ripetersi a proposito dell’usura ebraica. Soprattutto, vi è un altro rispetto sotto il quale il confronto è ancor più pertinente. È il fatto essenziale di tutta la faccenda, che gli ebrei non diventano nazionali per il solo fatto di divenire una parte politica di una qualsiasi nazione. Potremmo altrettanto bene dire che gli zingari avevano ville a Clapham, quando i loro carrozzoni sostavano sul Clapham Common.
Ma, naturalmente, perfino questo confronto tra i due popoli erranti fallisce al cospetto del problema maggiore. Anche qui perfino il tentativo di un parallelo lascia la cosa primaria più unica. Gli zingari non diventano municipali per il solo fatto di passare attraverso un certo numero di parrocchie, e sembrerebbe altrettanto ovvio che un ebreo non debba diventare inglese per il solo fatto di passare attraverso l’Inghilterra nel suo tragitto dalla Germania all’America. Ma lo zingaro non solo non è municipale, ma non è nemmeno chiamato municipale. Il suo carrozzone non viene immediatamente dipinto all’esterno col numero e il nome di Laburnam Road 123, Clapham. Le autorità municipali generalmente notano le ruote attaccate al nuovo villino, e perciò non cadono nell’errore. Lo zingaro può sostare in una particolare parrocchia, ma di norma non viene subito fatto consigliere parrocchiale. I casi in cui uno stagnino ambulante sia stato improvvisamente fatto sindaco di un’importante città industriale devono essere relativamente rari. E se i poveri vagabondi di sangue rom sono maltrattati da sindaci e magistrati, cacciati a calci dalla terra dai proprietari, inseguiti dai poliziotti e in generale sballottati da un posto all’altro, nessuno leva un grido che essi siano le vittime di una persecuzione religiosa; nessuno convoca assemblee in pubbliche sale, raccoglie sottoscrizioni o invia petizioni al parlamento; nessuno minaccia alcun altro con l’indignazione organizzata degli zingari di tutto il mondo. Il caso dell’ebreo nella nazione è assai diverso da quello dello stagnino nella città. Gli elementi morali a cui ci si può appellare sono di uno stile e di una scala assai diversi. Nessuno zingaro è milionario.
In short, the Jewish problem differs from anything like the gipsy problem in two highly practical respects. First, the Jews already exercise colossal cosmopolitan financial power. And second, the modern societies they live in also grant them vital forms of national political power. Here the vagrant is already as rich as a miser and 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 same ending of the story; but the truth stated here is quite independent of 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 Jews are only a curious sect of Englishmen, like the Plymouth Brothers or the Seventh Day Baptists, in the face of such a simple fact as the family of Rothschild. Nobody can pretend that such an English sect can establish five brothers, or even cousins, in the five great capitals of Europe. Nobody can pretend that the Seventh 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 in Petrograd 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 patriotism thinking 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 bound to a man equally powerful in another nation, by ties more private and personal even than nationality. Even when the purpose is not any 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 highly civilised nation of the Jews.
For what may be criticised here as Anti-Semitism is only the negative side of Zionism. For the sake of convenience I have begun by stating it in terms of the universal popular impression which some call a popular prejudice. But such a truth of differentiation is equally true on both its different sides. Suppose somebody proposes to mix up England and America, under some absurd name like the Anglo-Saxon Empire. One man may say, “Why should the jolly English inns and villages be swamped by these priggish provincial Yankees?” Another may say, “Why should the real democracy of a young country be tied to your snobbish old squirarchy?” But both these views are only versions of the same view of a great American: “God never made one people good 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-Semitism and to the charge of Anti-Semitism. The usual phrases about religious 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 there may be other than superstitious reasons for their unpopularity. They are not obliged to maintain that when a Piccadilly dandy talks about being in the hands of the Jews he is moved by the theological fanaticism that prevails in Piccadilly; or that when a silly youth on Derby Day says he was done by a dirty Jew, he is merely conforming to that Christian orthodoxy which is one of the strict traditions of the Turf. They are not, like some other Jews, forced to pay so extravagant a compliment to the Christian religion as to suppose it the ruling motive 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 local pawn-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 remedy is practicable, we will try to consider later, with something like 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 due to the abnormal position of the Jews. They are traders rather than producers because they have no land of their own from which to produce, and they are cosmopolitans rather than patriots because they have no country of their own for which to be patriotic. They can no more become farmers while they are vagrant than they could have built the Temple of Solomon while they were building the Pyramids of Egypt. They can no more feel the full stream of nationalism while they wander in the desert of nomadism than they could bathe in the waters of Jordan while they were weeping by the waters of Babylon. For exile is the worst kind of bondage. In insisting upon that at least the Zionists have insisted upon a profound truth, with many applications to many other moral issues. It is true that for any one whose heart is set on a particular home 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 principle applies to the two Anti-Semitic arguments already considered. The first is the charge of usury and unproductive loans, the second the charge either of treason or of unpatriotic detachment. The charge of usury is regarded, not unreasonably, as only a specially dangerous development of the general charge of uncreative 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 simple communities like those of Palestine. A very honest Moslem Arab said to me, with a singular blend of simplicity and humour, “A Jew does 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 not all do the same? Why do we not also do this and become rich?” This is, I need hardly say, an over-simplification. Jews often work hard at some things, especially intellectual things. But the same experience which tells us that we have known many industrious Jewish 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 us that we have not known personally many patient Jewish ploughmen, many laborious Jewish blacksmiths, many active Jewish hedgers and 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 fashionable to say so in these days of democracy and self-determination. Jews do not generally work on the land, or in any of the handicrafts that are akin to the land; but the Zionists reply that this is because 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.
In breve, il problema ebraico differisce da qualsiasi cosa simile al problema zingaro sotto due rispetti assai pratici. In primo luogo, gli ebrei esercitano già un colossale potere finanziario cosmopolita. E in secondo luogo, le società moderne in cui vivono concedono loro anche forme vitali di potere politico nazionale. Qui il vagabondo è già ricco quanto un avaro e il vagabondo è realmente fatto sindaco. Come si vedrà tra poco, vi è un lato ebraico della storia che conduce davvero al medesimo epilogo della storia; ma la verità qui esposta è del tutto indipendente da qualsiasi visione simpatetica o antipatetica della razza in questione. È una questione di fatto, che un ebreo assennato può permettersi di riconoscere, e che gli ebrei più assennati riconoscono in modo assai deciso. È davvero irrazionale che chiunque pretenda che gli ebrei siano soltanto una curiosa setta di inglesi, come i Fratelli di Plymouth o i Battisti del Settimo Giorno, di fronte a un fatto tanto semplice quanto la famiglia dei Rothschild. Nessuno può pretendere che una tale setta inglese possa insediare cinque fratelli, o anche cugini, nelle cinque grandi capitali d’Europa. Nessuno può pretendere che i Battisti del Settimo Giorno siano i sette nipoti di un solo nonno, disseminati sistematicamente tra le nazioni in guerra della terra. Nessuno pensa che i Fratelli di Plymouth siano letteralmente fratelli, o che siano probabilmente altrettanto potenti a Parigi o a Pietrogrado quanto a Plymouth.
Il problema ebraico può in fondo essere enunciato assai semplicemente. È normale che la nazione contenga la famiglia. Presso gli ebrei la famiglia è generalmente divisa fra le nazioni. Questo può non parere importante a coloro che non credono nelle nazioni, a coloro che davvero pensano che non dovrebbero esservi nazioni. Ma io letteralmente non riesco a comprendere chiunque creda nel patriottismo e pensi che questo stato di cose possa esservi conciliabile. È per sua natura intollerabile, da un punto di vista nazionale, che un uomo notoriamente potente in una nazione debba essere legato a un uomo ugualmente potente in un’altra nazione da vincoli più privati e personali della nazionalità stessa. Anche quando lo scopo non è alcuna sorta di tradimento, la posizione stessa è una sorta di tradimento. Dati i popoli appassionatamente patriottici dell’Europa occidentale in special modo, lo stato delle cose non può concepibilmente essere soddisfacente per un patriota. Ma meno di tutto può concepibilmente essere soddisfacente per un patriota ebreo; col che non intendo un finto inglese o un finto francese, ma un uomo che sia sinceramente patriota verso la storica e altamente civile nazione degli ebrei.
Poiché ciò che qui può essere criticato come antisemitismo è soltanto il lato negativo del sionismo. Per comodità ho cominciato enunciandolo nei termini dell’universale impressione popolare che alcuni chiamano un pregiudizio popolare. Ma una tale verità di differenziazione è ugualmente vera su entrambi i suoi diversi lati. Supponiamo che qualcuno proponga di mescolare l’Inghilterra e l’America, sotto qualche assurdo nome come Impero anglosassone. Un uomo può dire: «Perché le allegre locande e i villaggi inglesi dovrebbero essere sommersi da questi pedanti Yankee provinciali?». Un altro può dire: «Perché la vera democrazia di un giovane paese dovrebbe essere legata alla vostra snobistica vecchia aristocrazia terriera?». Ma entrambe queste opinioni non sono che versioni della medesima veduta di un grande americano: «Dio non ha mai fatto un popolo abbastanza buono da governarne un altro».
Il punto primario riguardo al sionismo è che, giusto o sbagliato che sia, esso offre davvero una risposta reale e ragionevole tanto all’antisemitismo quanto all’accusa di antisemitismo. Le solite frasi sulla persecuzione religiosa e sull’odio razziale non sono risposte ragionevoli, né risposte affatto. Questi ebrei non negano di essere ebrei; non negano che gli ebrei possano essere impopolari; non negano che vi possano essere ragioni diverse da quelle superstiziose per la loro impopolarità. Non sono obbligati a sostenere che quando un damerino di Piccadilly parla di essere nelle mani degli ebrei egli è mosso dal fanatismo teologico che prevale a Piccadilly; o che quando uno sciocco giovanotto nel giorno del Derby dice di essere stato imbrogliato da un sudicio ebreo, egli non fa che conformarsi a quell’ortodossia cristiana che è una delle rigide tradizioni dell’ippica. Non sono, come certi altri ebrei, costretti a tributare un complimento tanto stravagante alla religione cristiana da supporla il movente dominante di metà dei discorsi scontenti nei circoli e nelle osterie, di quasi ogni uomo d’affari che sospetta di un finanziere straniero, o di quasi ogni operaio che brontola contro il locale prestatore su pegno. La mania religiosa, purtroppo, non è così comune. I sionisti non hanno bisogno di negare alcuna di queste cose; ciò che offrono non è una negazione ma una diagnosi e un rimedio. Se la loro diagnosi sia corretta, se il loro rimedio sia praticabile, cercheremo di considerarlo più avanti, con qualcosa come un equo sommario di ciò che si può dire da entrambe le parti. Ma la loro teoria, in apparenza, è perfettamente ragionevole. È la teoria secondo cui ogni qualità anormale negli ebrei è dovuta alla posizione anormale degli ebrei. Sono commercianti piuttosto che produttori perché non hanno una terra propria da cui produrre, e sono cosmopoliti piuttosto che patrioti perché non hanno un paese proprio per cui essere patrioti. Non possono più diventare agricoltori mentre vagano di quanto avrebbero potuto costruire il Tempio di Salomone mentre costruivano le Piramidi d’Egitto. Non possono più sentire la piena corrente del nazionalismo mentre vagano nel deserto del nomadismo di quanto potessero bagnarsi nelle acque del Giordano mentre piangevano lungo le acque di Babilonia. Poiché l’esilio è la peggiore specie di schiavitù. Nell’insistere su questo almeno i sionisti hanno insistito su una profonda verità, con molte applicazioni a molte altre questioni morali. È vero che per chiunque abbia il cuore fisso su una particolare casa o su un particolare santuario, essere chiuso fuori significa essere chiuso dentro. La più angusta prigione possibile per lui è il mondo intero.
Sarà bene, tuttavia, notare brevemente come il principio si applichi ai due argomenti antisemiti già considerati. Il primo è l’accusa di usura e di prestiti improduttivi, il secondo l’accusa o di tradimento o di distacco antipatriottico. L’accusa di usura è considerata, non irragionevolmente, soltanto uno sviluppo particolarmente pericoloso dell’accusa generale di commercio non creativo e di rifiuto dell’esercizio manuale creativo; il prestito improduttivo è soltanto una forma minore del lavoro improduttivo. È certamente vero che quest’ultima lagnanza è, se possibile, più comune della prima, specialmente in comunità relativamente semplici come quelle della Palestina. Un assai onesto arabo musulmano mi disse, con una singolare mescolanza di semplicità e di arguzia: «Un ebreo non lavora; eppure diventa ricco. Non vedi mai un ebreo lavorare; eppure diventano ricchi. Quello che voglio sapere è: perché non facciamo tutti lo stesso? Perché non facciamo anche noi questo e non diventiamo ricchi?». Questa è, non ho quasi bisogno di dirlo, una semplificazione eccessiva. Gli ebrei spesso lavorano sodo in alcune cose, specialmente in cose intellettuali. Ma la stessa esperienza che ci dice di aver conosciuto molti industriosi studiosi ebrei, avvocati ebrei, medici ebrei, pianisti ebrei, scacchisti e così via, è un’esperienza che taglia da entrambe le parti. La stessa esperienza, se consultata con cura, ci dirà probabilmente che non abbiamo conosciuto personalmente molti pazienti aratori ebrei, molti laboriosi fabbri ebrei, molti attivi potatori e cavafossi ebrei, o anche molti energici cacciatori e pescatori ebrei. In breve, l’impressione popolare è discretamente fedele alla vita, come lo sono assai spesso le impressioni popolari; benché non sia di moda dirlo in questi giorni di democrazia e di autodeterminazione. Gli ebrei generalmente non lavorano la terra, né in alcuno dei mestieri manuali che alla terra sono affini; ma i sionisti rispondono che ciò è perché non può mai essere davvero la loro terra. Questo è il sionismo, e questo ha davvero un posto pratico nel passato e nel futuro di Sion.
Patriotism is not merely dying for the nation. It is dying with the nation. It is regarding the fatherland not merely as 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 Jews do not feel like this about their adopted country; and I doubt if the most intelligent of the Jews would pretend that they did. Even if we can bring ourselves to believe that Disraeli lived for 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. Eckstein had patriotic tears in his eyes when he obtained a gold concession from Queen Victoria, we cannot believe that in her absence he would have refused a similar concession from the German Emperor. When the Jew in France or in England says he is a good patriot he only means that he is a good citizen, and he would put it more truly if he said he was a good exile. Sometimes indeed he is an abominably bad citizen, and a most exasperating and execrable exile, but I am not talking of that side of the case. I am assuming that a man like Disraeli did really make a romance of England, that a man like Dernburg did really make a romance of Germany, and it is still true that though it was a romance, they would not have allowed it to be a tragedy. They would have seen 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 and last great truth in Zionism. Jerusalem was destroyed and Jews were destroyed with it, men who cared no longer to live because the city of their faith had fallen. It may be questioned whether all the Zionists have all the sublime insanity of the Zealots. But at least it is not nonsense to suggest that the Zionists might feel like this about Zion. It is nonsense to suggest that they would ever feel like this about Dublin or Moscow. And so far at least the truth both in Semitism and Anti-Semitism is 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 more of Nero the monster who killed his mother than of Nero the noble Roman who defeated Hannibal. The name of Julian more often suggests Julian the Apostate than Julian the Saint; though the latter crowned his canonisation with the sacred glory of being the patron saint of inn-keepers. But the best example of this unjust historical habit 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 call it a Christian name, except in the more evasive form of Jude. And even that, as the name of a more faithful apostle, is another illustration 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 wicked men these early Christians were!” was certainly more successful in innocence than in irony; for he seems to have been innocent or ignorant of the whole idea of the Christian communion. Judas Iscariot was 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 known everywhere merely as the name of a traitor. The name of Judas nearly always means Judas Iscariot; it hardly ever means Judas Maccabeus. And if you shout out “Judas” to a politician in the thick of a political tumult, you will have some difficulty in soothing him afterwards, with the assurance that you had merely traced in him something of that splendid zeal and valour which dragged down the tyranny of Antiochus, in the day of the great deliverance of Israel.
Those two possible uses of the name of Judas would give us yet another compact embodiment of the case for Zionism. Numberless international Jews have gained the bad name of Judas, and some have certainly earned it. If you have gained or earned the good name of Judas, it can quite fairly and intelligently be affirmed that this was not the 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 stories of mankind, there is no more perfect type of the element of chivalry in rebellion, than that magnificent tale of the Maccabee who stabbed from underneath the elephant of Antiochus and died under the fall of that huge and living castle. But it would be unreasonable to ask Mr. 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 therefore he naturally prefers to interest himself either in operations in silver or in somewhat slower and less efficient methods of liberation. In short, whatever we may think of the financial or social services such as were rendered to England in the affair of Marconi, or to France in the affair of Panama, it must be admitted that these exhibit a humbler and more humdrum type of civic duty, and do not remind us 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 national hero of nowhere; and for this particular type of patriotic passion it is necessary to have a patria. The Zionists therefore are maintaining a perfectly reasonable proposition, both about the charge of usury and the charge of treason, if they claim that both could be cured by the return to a national soil as promised in Zionism.
Il patriottismo non è meramente morire per la nazione. È morire con la nazione. È considerare la patria non meramente come un reale luogo di riposo come una locanda, ma come un luogo di riposo definitivo, come una casa o persino una tomba. Nemmeno i più sciovinisti fra gli ebrei sentono così riguardo al loro paese d’adozione; e dubito che il più intelligente fra gli ebrei pretenderebbe che lo facessero. Anche se riusciamo a persuaderci che Disraeli visse per l’Inghilterra, non possiamo pensare che sarebbe morto con lei. Se l’Inghilterra fosse sprofondata nell’Atlantico, egli non sarebbe sprofondato con lei, ma sarebbe agevolmente galleggiato fino in America per candidarsi alla presidenza. Anche se siamo profondamente convinti che il signor Beit o il signor Eckstein avessero lacrime patriottiche negli occhi quando ottennero una concessione aurifera dalla Regina Vittoria, non possiamo credere che in sua assenza egli avrebbe rifiutato una concessione analoga dall’Imperatore tedesco. Quando l’ebreo in Francia o in Inghilterra dice di essere un buon patriota, intende soltanto di essere un buon cittadino, e direbbe più veramente se dicesse di essere un buon esule. Talvolta invero egli è un cittadino abominevolmente cattivo, e un esule quanto mai esasperante ed esecrabile, ma non parlo di questo lato della questione. Sto assumendo che un uomo come Disraeli facesse davvero un romanzo dell’Inghilterra, che un uomo come Dernburg facesse davvero un romanzo della Germania, ed è pur sempre vero che, benché fosse un romanzo, non avrebbero permesso che divenisse una tragedia. Avrebbero fatto in modo che la storia avesse un lieto fine, specialmente per se stessi. Questi ebrei non sarebbero morti con alcuna nazione cristiana.
Ma gli ebrei morirono davvero con Gerusalemme. Questa è la prima e ultima grande verità del sionismo. Gerusalemme fu distrutta e con essa furono distrutti gli ebrei, uomini che non si curavano più di vivere perché la città della loro fede era caduta. Ci si può chiedere se tutti i sionisti abbiano tutta la sublime follia degli Zeloti. Ma almeno non è insensato suggerire che i sionisti possano sentire così riguardo a Sion. È insensato suggerire che possano mai sentire così riguardo a Dublino o a Mosca. E almeno fin qui la verità tanto nel semitismo quanto nell’antisemitismo è compresa nel sionismo.
È un luogo comune che gli infami siano più famosi dei famosi. Byron notava, con la sua propria misantropica morale, che pensiamo più a Nerone il mostro che uccise sua madre che a Nerone il nobile romano che sconfisse Annibale. Il nome di Giuliano suggerisce più spesso Giuliano l’Apostata che Giuliano il Santo; benché quest’ultimo coronasse la propria canonizzazione con la sacra gloria di essere il patrono degli albergatori. Ma il miglior esempio di questa ingiusta abitudine storica è il più famoso di tutti e il più infame di tutti. Se vi è un nome proprio che è divenuto un nome comune, se vi è un nome che è stato generalizzato fino a significare una cosa, è certamente il nome di Giuda. Esiteremmo forse a chiamarlo un nome di battesimo, se non nella forma più elusiva di Giuda Taddeo. E perfino quello, come nome di un apostolo più fedele, è un’altra illustrazione della medesima ingiustizia; poiché, al confronto con l’altro, Giuda il fedele potrebbe quasi essere chiamato Giuda l’oscuro. Il critico che disse, sia innocentemente sia ironicamente, «Che uomini malvagi erano questi primi cristiani!» ebbe certamente più successo nell’innocenza che nell’ironia; poiché sembra essere stato innocente o ignorante dell’intera idea della comunione cristiana. Giuda Iscariota fu uno dei primissimi fra tutti i possibili primi cristiani. E tutto il punto su di lui era che la sua mano era nel medesimo piatto; il traditore è sempre un amico, altrimenti non potrebbe mai essere un nemico. Ma il punto, per il momento, è semplicemente che il nome è conosciuto ovunque meramente come il nome di un traditore. Il nome di Giuda significa quasi sempre Giuda Iscariota; non significa quasi mai Giuda Maccabeo. E se gridate «Giuda» a un politico nel folto di un tumulto politico, avrete qualche difficoltà a rabbonirlo in seguito, con l’assicurazione che avevate soltanto ravvisato in lui qualcosa di quello splendido zelo e valore che abbatté la tirannide di Antioco, nel giorno della grande liberazione d’Israele.
Quei due possibili usi del nome di Giuda ci darebbero un’ulteriore compatta incarnazione della causa del sionismo. Innumerevoli ebrei internazionali hanno guadagnato il cattivo nome di Giuda, e alcuni certamente se lo sono meritato. Se avete guadagnato o meritato il buon nome di Giuda, si può assai equamente e intelligentemente affermare che questo non fu colpa degli ebrei, ma della peculiare posizione degli ebrei. Un uomo può tradire come Giuda Iscariota nella casa di un altro uomo; ma un uomo non può combattere come Giuda Maccabeo per il tempio di un altro uomo. Non vi è storia rivoluzionaria più veramente entusiasmante fra tutte le storie dell’umanità, non vi è tipo più perfetto dell’elemento di cavalleria nella ribellione, di quella magnifica vicenda del Maccabeo che colpì da sotto l’elefante di Antioco e morì sotto la caduta di quell’enorme e vivente castello. Ma sarebbe irragionevole chiedere al signor Montagu di conficcare un coltello nell’elefante su cui Lord Curzon, mettiamo, cavalcasse in tutta la pompa dell’imperialismo asiatico. Poiché il signor Montagu non starebbe liberando la propria terra; e perciò egli preferisce naturalmente interessarsi o di operazioni in argento o di metodi di liberazione alquanto più lenti e meno efficienti. In breve, qualunque cosa pensiamo dei servigi finanziari o sociali come quelli resi all’Inghilterra nell’affare Marconi, o alla Francia nell’affare di Panamá, si deve ammettere che questi mostrano un tipo più umile e più prosaico di dovere civico, e non ci rammentano le virtù più temerarie dei Maccabei o degli Zeloti. Un uomo può essere un buon cittadino di un luogo qualsiasi, ma non può essere un eroe nazionale di nessun luogo; e per questo particolare tipo di passione patriottica è necessario avere una patria. I sionisti perciò sostengono una proposizione perfettamente ragionevole, tanto riguardo all’accusa di usura quanto all’accusa di tradimento, se pretendono che entrambe potrebbero essere sanate dal ritorno a un suolo nazionale come promesso nel sionismo.
Unfortunately they are not always reasonable about their own reasonable proposition. Some of them have a most unlucky habit of ignoring, and therefore implicitly denying, the very evil that they are wisely trying to cure. I have already remarked this 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 this moment this first question is in every sense the primary question. Palestine has hardly as yet a patriotism to be betrayed; but it certainly has a peasantry to be oppressed, and especially to be oppressed as so many peasantries have been with usury and forestalling. The Syrians and Arabs and all the agricultural and pastoral populations of Palestine are, rightly or wrongly, alarmed and angered at the advent of the Jews to power; for the perfectly practical and simple reason 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 enormous and elementary a fact as that reputation and its natural results. It may or may not in this case be unjust; but in any case it is not unnatural. It may be the result of persecution, but it is one that has definitely resulted. It may be the consequence of a misunderstanding; but it is a misunderstanding that must itself be understood. Rightly or wrongly, certain people in Palestine fear the coming of the Jews as they fear the coming of the locusts; they regard them as parasites that feed on a community by a thousand methods of financial intrigue and economic exploitation. I could understand the Jews indignantly denying this, or eagerly disproving it, or best of all, explaining what is true in it while exposing 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 no such thing in the world.
I will give one curious example from one of the best and most brilliant of the Zionists. Dr. Weizmann is a man of large mind and human sympathies; and it is difficult to believe that any one with so fine a sense of humanity can be entirely empty of anything like a sense of humour. Yet, in the middle of a very temperate and magnanimous address on “Zionist Policy,” he can actually say a thing like this, “The Arabs need us with our knowledge, and our experience and our money. If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they will fall among sharks.” One is tempted for the moment to doubt whether any one else in the world could have said that, except the Jew with his strange mixture of brilliancy and blindness, of subtlety and simplicity. It is much as if President Wilson were to say, “Unless America deals with Mexico, it will be dealt with by some modern commercial power, that has trust-magnates and hustling millionaires.” But would President 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 put under 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 of sentence 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 will perhaps be in danger of massacres.” I suspect that a Turk would see the 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 the first thing to do is to discover what the Arabs are afraid of. And very little investigation will reveal the simple truth that they are very much afraid of sharks; and that in their book of symbolic or heraldic zoology it is the Jew who is adorned with the dorsal fin and the crescent of cruel teeth. This may be a fairy-tale about a 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 tribes are afraid, not only of the dorsal fin and dental arrangements which 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 respectable professor what he himself considers as his claims to respect. And as the imagery about the shark may be too metaphorical or almost mythological, there is not the smallest difficulty in stating 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 trickery and an experience of political intrigue, and the power given by 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 kind it has to be proved to be unjust. Feeling as I do the force of the real case for Zionism, I venture most earnestly to implore the Jews to disprove it, and not to dismiss it. But above all I implore them not to be content with assuring us again and 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 desire to enter Palestine like a Junker or drive thousands of Arabs forcibly out of the land; nobody supposes that Dr. Weizmann looks like a Junker; and nobody among the enemies of the Jews says that they have driven their foes in that fashion since the wars with the Canaanites. But for the Jews to reassure us by insisting on their own economic culture or commercial education is exactly like the Junkers reassuring us by insisting on the unquestioned supremacy of their Kaiser or the unquestioned obedience of their soldiers. Men bar themselves in their houses, or even hide themselves in their cellars, when such virtues are abroad in the land.
Purtroppo non sempre sono ragionevoli riguardo alla loro stessa ragionevole proposta. Alcuni di loro hanno l’abitudine assai sciagurata di ignorare, e perciò di negare implicitamente, proprio quel male che con saggezza cercano di curare. Ho già rilevato questa irritante innocenza nella prima delle due questioni; la critica che vede tutto in Shylock tranne il suo punto essenziale, ovvero la punta del suo coltello. Quanto, nella politica della Palestina in questo momento, questa prima questione sia in ogni senso la questione primaria. La Palestina non possiede ancora quasi un patriottismo da tradire; ma possiede di certo un contadinato da opprimere, e in special modo da opprimere, come sono stati oppressi tanti contadinati, con l’usura e l’accaparramento. I Siriani e gli Arabi e tutte le popolazioni agricole e pastorali della Palestina sono, a torto o a ragione, allarmate e adirate per l’avvento degli Ebrei al potere; per la ragione perfettamente pratica e semplice della reputazione che gli Ebrei hanno in tutto il mondo. È davvero ridicolo che persone intelligenti come gli Ebrei, e specialmente intelligenti come i Sionisti, ignorino un fatto tanto enorme ed elementare quale quella reputazione e i suoi naturali effetti. In questo caso può essere ingiusta o no; ma in ogni caso non è innaturale. Può essere il risultato della persecuzione, ma è un risultato che si è comunque prodotto. Può essere la conseguenza di un malinteso; ma è un malinteso che va esso stesso compreso. A torto o a ragione, certe persone in Palestina temono l’arrivo degli Ebrei come temono l’arrivo delle locuste; li considerano parassiti che si nutrono di una comunità con mille metodi d’intrigo finanziario e di sfruttamento economico. Potrei capire che gli Ebrei neghino tutto ciò con indignazione, o lo confutino con ardore, o, meglio ancora, spieghino ciò che vi è di vero smascherando ciò che vi è di falso. Ciò che è strano, direi quasi sinistro, nell’atteggiamento di alcuni Sionisti assai intelligenti e sinceri, è che parlano, scrivono e a quanto pare pensano come se una cosa simile non esistesse al mondo.
Darò un curioso esempio tratto da uno dei migliori e più brillanti tra i Sionisti. Il dottor Weizmann è un uomo di larghe vedute e di simpatie umane; ed è difficile credere che chiunque abbia un senso dell’umanità tanto raffinato possa essere del tutto privo di qualcosa come il senso dell’umorismo. Eppure, nel mezzo di un discorso assai temperato e magnanimo sulla «Politica sionista», egli può davvero dire una cosa come questa: «Gli Arabi hanno bisogno di noi, del nostro sapere, della nostra esperienza e del nostro denaro. Se non avranno noi, cadranno nelle mani di altri, cadranno tra gli squali.» Si è tentati per un momento di dubitare che qualcun altro al mondo avrebbe potuto dire una cosa simile, tranne l’Ebreo con la sua strana mescolanza di genialità e cecità, di sottigliezza e semplicità. È press’a poco come se il presidente Wilson dicesse: «A meno che l’America non si occupi del Messico, se ne occuperà qualche moderna potenza commerciale, che ha magnati dei trust e milionari intraprendenti.» Ma lo direbbe il presidente Wilson? È come se il Cancelliere tedesco avesse detto: «Dobbiamo correre in soccorso dei poveri Belgi, o potrebbero finire sotto qualche sistema dal rigido militarismo e dalla burocrazia prepotente.» Ma persino un Cancelliere tedesco lo formulerebbe esattamente così? Qualcuno lo formulerebbe nell’esatto ordine di parole e struttura di frase in cui l’ha formulato il dottor Weizmann? Direbbero persino i Turchi: «Gli Armeni hanno bisogno di noi, del nostro ordine e della nostra disciplina e delle nostre armi. Se non avranno noi, cadranno nelle mani di altri, saranno forse in pericolo di massacri.» Sospetto che un Turco coglierebbe la battuta, anche se fosse truce come i massacri stessi. Se i Sionisti desiderano acquietare i timori degli Arabi, senza dubbio la prima cosa da fare è scoprire di che cosa gli Arabi hanno paura. E ben poca indagine rivelerà la semplice verità che essi hanno molta paura degli squali; e che nel loro libro di zoologia simbolica o araldica è l’Ebreo a essere adornato della pinna dorsale e della mezzaluna di denti crudeli. Questa può essere una favola su un animale favoloso; ma è una di quelle in cui ogni sorta di razze crede, e certo una in cui queste razze credono.
Ma il caso è ancora più curioso di così. Queste tribù semplici hanno paura non solo della pinna dorsale e della dentatura che il dottor Weizmann può dire (con una certa ragione) di non possedere; hanno paura anche delle altre cose che egli dice di possedere. Possono errare, a un primo superficiale sguardo, scambiando un rispettabile professore per uno squalo. Ma difficilmente possono sbagliarsi nell’attribuire al rispettabile professore ciò che egli stesso considera i suoi titoli al rispetto. E poiché l’immagine dello squalo può essere troppo metaforica o quasi mitologica, non vi è la minima difficoltà nell’affermare con parole chiare ciò che gli Arabi temono negli Ebrei. Essi temono, in termini esatti, il loro sapere e la loro esperienza e il loro denaro. Gli Arabi temono esattamente le tre cose di cui egli dice che hanno bisogno. Solo che gli Arabi la chiamerebbero una conoscenza dell’imbroglio finanziario e un’esperienza dell’intrigo politico, e il potere dato da mucchi di denaro non solo proprio ma di altri popoli. Riguardo al dottor Weizmann e ai veri Sionisti questo è di per sé evidentemente ingiusto; ma riguardo all’influenza ebraica del genere più visibile e volgare bisogna dimostrarne l’ingiustizia. Sentendo come sento la forza del reale argomento a favore del Sionismo, oso implorare assai fervidamente gli Ebrei di confutarlo, e non di liquidarlo. Ma soprattutto li imploro di non accontentarsi di assicurarci ancora e ancora del loro sapere e della loro esperienza e del loro denaro. È questo che la gente teme come una pestilenza o un terremoto; il loro sapere e la loro esperienza e il loro denaro. È inutile che il dottor Weizmann ci dica che non desidera entrare in Palestina come uno Junker né cacciare a forza migliaia di Arabi dalla terra; nessuno suppone che il dottor Weizmann somigli a uno Junker; e nessuno tra i nemici degli Ebrei dice che essi abbiano scacciato i loro avversari in quel modo dai tempi delle guerre con i Cananei. Ma che gli Ebrei ci rassicurino insistendo sulla propria cultura economica o educazione commerciale è esattamente come gli Junker che ci rassicurano insistendo sull’indiscussa supremazia del loro Kaiser o sull’indiscussa obbedienza dei loro soldati. Gli uomini si sbarrano in casa, o addirittura si nascondono nelle cantine, quando simili virtù sono in giro per il paese.
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 unpopular thing to answer with boasts, especially boasts of the very quality that 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 must not merely insist on the virtues the Jews do show, but rather deal with the particular virtues which they are generally accused of not showing. It is necessary to understand this more thoroughly than it is generally understood, and especially better than it is 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 of the Anti-Zionists know that they know it. And some of the phrases of the Zionists, such as those that I have noted, too often tend to 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 vision of sitting under their own vine and fig-tree, and even with its accompanying lesson that it is first necessary to grow the fig-tree and the vine.
The true test of Zionism may seem a topsy-turvy test. It will not succeed by the number of successes, but rather by the number of failures, or what the world (and certainly not least the Jewish world) has generally called failures. It will be tested, not by whether Jews can climb to the top of 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 positions of power and trust outside Israel, like Witte in Russia or Rufus Isaacs in England. It is generally bad, I think, for their adopted country; but in any case it is no good for the particular problem of their own country. Palestine cannot have a population of Prime Ministers and 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 enemies into hewers of wood and drawers of water. The modern Jews have to 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 kinds the most perilous and the most imperilled. Hence a Jewish state 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 success when 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 ease as an upper-gardener, a yokel who is still a yokel, or even a village idiot at least sufficiently idiotic to remain in his village, then indeed the world will come to blow the trumpets and lift up the heads of the everlasting gates; for God will have turned the captivity of Zion.
Zionists of whose sincerity I am personally convinced, and of whose intelligence anybody would be convinced, have told me that there really is, in places like Rishon, something like a beginning of this spirit; the love of the peasant for his land. One lady, even in expressing her conviction of it, called it “this very un-Jewish characteristic.” She was perfectly well aware both of the 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-turvy test I have suggested; that of whether men are worthy to be drudges. When a humorous and humane Jew thus accepts the test, and honestly expects the Jewish people to pass it, then I think the claim is very serious indeed, and one not lightly to be set aside. I do certainly think it a very serious responsibility under the circumstances to set it altogether aside. It is our whole complaint against 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 me a 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 love any of the lands in which he wanders; it seems rather indefensible to be deaf 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 long as his conduct on it was watched and tested according to the principles I 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 hundred men 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 soil belong to him. He must have the simplicity, and what many would call the stupidity of the peasant. He must not only call a spade a spade, but regard it as a spade and not as a speculation. By some true conversion the urban and modern man must be not only on the soil, but of the soil, and free from our urban trick of 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 Jew as a mere capitalist. The Jews explain it, however, by saying that the Arabs will work for a lower wage, and that this is necessarily a great temptation to the struggling colonists. In this they may be acting naturally as colonists, but it is none the less clear that they are not yet acting literally as labourers. It may not be their fault that they are not proving themselves to be peasants; but it is none the less clear that this situation in itself does not prove them to be peasants. So far as that is concerned, it still remains to be decided finally whether a Jew will be an agricultural 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 which many 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.
In breve la paura degli ebrei in Palestina, ragionevole o irragionevole, è una cosa che deve essere risolta con la ragione. È inutile per chi è impopolare rispondere vantandosi, specialmente vantandosi proprio della qualità che lo rende impopolare. Ma credo che si possa risolvere con la ragione, o almeno metterla alla prova con la ragione; e i test valutarli con attenzione. Il principio è ancora quello sopra esposto: i test non devono insistere semplicemente sulle virtù che gli ebrei dimostrano, ma piuttosto affrontare le particolari virtù di cui generalmente si accusa loro di non dare prova. È necessario capirlo più a fondo di quanto sia generalmente compreso, e specialmente meglio di come venga solitamente espresso nel linguaggio della controversia alla moda. Perché la questione coinvolge l’intero successo o fallimento del sionismo. Molti dei sionisti lo sanno; ma io piuttosto dubito che molti degli anti-sionisti sappiano che loro lo sanno. E alcune delle frasi dei sionisti, come quelle che ho notato, troppo spesso tendono a produrre l’impressione di ignorare quando non sono ignoranti. Non sono ignoranti; e nella pratica non ignorano; anche quando un’abitudine intellettuale li fa sembrare teoricamente ignari. Chiunque abbia visto un insediamento rurale ebraico, come Rishon, non può dubitare che alcuni ebrei siano sinceramente pervasi dalla visione di sedere sotto la propria vite e fico, e anche della lezione che ne consegue: che è prima necessario far crescere il fico e la vite.
La vera prova del sionismo può sembrare una prova al contrario. Non avrà successo per il numero di successi, ma piuttosto per il numero degli insuccessi, o per quello che il mondo (e certamente non da ultimo il mondo ebraico) ha generalmente chiamato insuccessi. Sarà messa alla prova non dal fatto che gli Ebrei possano scalare la cima della scala, ma dal fatto che gli Ebrei possano rimanere in fondo; non dal fatto che abbiano cento modi di diventare importanti, ma dal fatto che abbiano qualche abilità nell’arte di rimanere insignificanti. Si nota spesso che l’Ebreo intelligente può salire a posizioni di potere e fiducia al di fuori d’Israele, come Witte in Russia o Rufus Isaacs in Inghilterra. Penso sia generalmente negativo per il loro paese adottivo; ma comunque non è positivo per il problema particolare del loro paese. La Palestina non può avere una popolazione di Primi Ministri e Capi Giudici; e se coloro che governano e giudicano non sono Ebrei, allora non abbiamo istituito un commonwealth ma solo un’oligarchia. Si dice ancora che gli antichi Ebrei trasformassero i loro nemici in taglialegna e attingitori di acqua. Gli Ebrei moderni devono trasformarsi in taglialegna e attingitori di acqua. Se non possono farlo, non possono trasformarsi in cittadini, ma solo in una specie di burocrati stranieri, la più pericolosa e la più minacciata di tutte. Dunque uno stato ebraico non sarà un successo quando gli Ebrei saranno di successo, o anche quando gli Ebrei saranno uomini di Stato. Sarà un successo quando gli Ebrei saranno spazzini, quando gli Ebrei saranno spazzacamini, quando saranno scaricatori e scavatori di fosse e facchini e manovali. Quando lo sionista potrà indicare con orgoglio un operaio ebreo che non è salito nel mondo, un giardiniere subalterno che non si sta ora godendo la vita come giardiniere capo, uno zotico che è ancora uno zotico, o anche un idiota del villaggio abbastanza idiota da rimanere nel suo villaggio, allora sì il mondo verrà a suonare le trombe e sollevare le teste delle porte eterne; perché Dio avrà fatto cessare la cattività di Sion.
Gli sionisti di cui sono personalmente convinto della sincerità, e dell’intelligenza dei quali chiunque sarebbe convinto, mi hanno detto che ci sono davvero luoghi come Rishon dove si vede qualcosa che assomiglia a un principio di questo spirito: l’amore del contadino per la sua terra. Una signora, anche nel manifestare la propria convinzione in proposito, lo ha definito “questo carattere così poco ebraico”. Era perfettamente bene consapevole sia della necessità di questo sentimento nella terra ebraica che della sua mancanza nella razza ebrea. In breve era bene consapevole della verità di quel test apparentemente capovolto che ho suggerito; quello cioè se gli uomini sono degni di essere servi. Quando un ebreo umoristico ed umano accetta così il test, e si aspetta onestamente che il popolo ebraico lo superi, allora ritengo che la pretesa sia davvero molto seria, e non da mettere facilmente da parte. Penso infatti che sia una responsabilità molto grave sotto le circostanze scartarla del tutto. Il nostro unico rimprovero contro l’ebreo è che egli non coltiva la terra né lavora con la vanga; è davvero duro rifiutargli qualcosa se dice veramente: “Datemi una terra e io la coltiverò; datemi una vanga e io la userò.” Il nostro unico motivo per diffidare di lui è che non può realmente amare nessuna delle terre in cui si aggira; sembra piuttosto indefendibile essere sordi a lui se dice veramente: “Datemi una terra e io la amerò.” Gli darei certamente una terra o qualche parte della terra, (in quale senso generale cercherò di suggerire più avanti) purché il suo comportamento su di essa fosse osservato e messo alla prova secondo i principi che ho proposto. Se chiede la vanga deve usare la vanga, e non semplicemente impiegare la vanga, nel senso di assumere mezza dozzina di uomini per usarla. Se chiede la terra deve coltivare la terra; cioè deve appartenere alla terra e non semplicemente far sì che la terra gli appartenga. Deve avere la semplicità, e quello che molti chiamano la stupidità del contadino. Non solo deve chiamare una vanga vanga, ma considerarla come tale e non come un’occasione di guadagno. Per una vera conversione l’uomo urbano e moderno deve essere non solo sulla terra, ma della terra, e libero dal nostro trucco urbano di inventare la parola sporco per la polvere a cui torneremo. Deve lavarsi nel fango, perché possa essere pulito.
Quanto tutto ciò possa realmente accadere è molto difficile da scoprire per chiunque, specialmente per un visitatore occasionale, nella presente crisi. Si ammette che ci sia molta manodopera araba e siriana impiegata; e questo di per sé lascerebbe in essere tutto il pericolo dell’ebreo come mero capitalista. Gli ebrei spiegano ciò dicendo tuttavia che gli arabi lavorano per uno stipendio più basso, e che ciò è necessariamente una grande tentazione per i coloni in difficoltà. In questo possono agire naturalmente come coloni, ma non è meno chiaro che non stanno ancora agendo letteralmente come operai. Potrebbe non essere colpa loro se non si dimostrano contadini; ma non è meno chiaro che questa situazione di per sé non li dimostra contadini. Per quanto riguarda ciò, resta ancora da decidere definitivamente se un ebreo sarà un lavoratore agricolo, se è un lavoratore agricolo decentemente pagato. D’altra parte, i leader di questi esperimenti locali, se non hanno ancora mostrato il materialismo superiore dei contadini, non mostrano certamente il materialismo inferiore dei capitalisti. Non ci può essere dubbio dello spirito patriottico e persino poetico con cui molti di loro sperano di far fiorire la loro antica terra desolata come la rosa. Essi almeno starebbero ancora tra i grandi profeti d’Israele, e non meno sebbene abbiano profetizzato invano.
I have tried to state fairly the case for Zionism, for the reason already stated; that I think it intellectually unjust that any attempt of the Jews to regularise their position should merely be rejected as one of their irregularities. But I do not disguise the enormous difficulties of doing it in the particular conditions Of Palestine. In fact the greatest of the real difficulties of Zionism is that it has to take place in Zion. There are other difficulties, however, which when they are not specially the fault of Zionists are very much the fault of Jews. The worst is the general impression of a business pressure from the more brutal and businesslike type of Jew, which arouses very violent and very just indignation. When I was in Jerusalem it was openly said that Jewish financiers had complained of the low rate of interest at which loans were made by the government to the peasantry, and even that the government had yielded to them. If this were true it was a heavier reproach to the government even than to the Jews. But the general truth is that such a state of feeling seems to make the simple and solid patriotism 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 Zionists was suggested to me by Dr. Weizmann, who is a man not only highly intelligent but ardent and sympathetic. And the phrase he used gives 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 did not think Palestine could be a single and simple national territory quite in the sense of France; but he did not see why it should not be 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 itself more 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 meaning or no, clearly involves the abandonment of the solidarity of Palestine, and tolerates the idea of groups of Jews being separated from each other by populations of a different type. Now if once this notion be considered admissible, it seems to me capable of considerable extension. It seems possible that there might be not only Jewish cantons in Palestine but Jewish cantons outside Palestine, Jewish colonies in suitable and selected places 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 some great 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 without bothering about the site of the Temple. That they should have 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 place of sacrifice need even mean so much to that historic tradition as it would to many others. That the Jews should have some high place of dignity and ritual in Palestine, such as a great building like 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 remembers has a right.” The very worst of the Jews, as well as the very best, do in some sense remember. They are hated and persecuted and frightened 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 more we admire the manly and magnificent elements among the more vague and vagrant tribes of Palestine, the more we must admit that paradox. The unheroic have the heroic memory; and the heroic people have no memory.
But whatever the Jewish nation might wish to do about a national shrine or other supreme centre, the suggestion for the moment is that something like a Jewish territorial scheme might really be attempted, if we permit the Jews to be scattered no longer as individuals but as groups. It seems possible that by some such extension of the definition of Zionism we might ultimately overcome even the greatest difficulty of Zionism, the difficulty of resettling a sufficient number of so large a race on so small a land. For if the advantage of the ideal to the Jews is to gain the promised land, the advantage to the Gentiles is to get rid of the Jewish problem, and I do not see why we should obtain all their advantage and none of our own. Therefore I would leave as few Jews as possible in other established nations, and to these I 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 course the 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 give the same privileged position to all Jews everywhere, as an alternative policy to Zionism, if Zionism failed by the test I have named; the only true and the only tolerable test; if the Jews had not so much failed as peasants as succeeded as capitalists.
Ho cercato di esporre onestamente le ragioni del sionismo, per il motivo già detto: che ritengo intellettualmente ingiusto che qualsiasi tentativo degli ebrei di regolarizzare la propria posizione venga semplicemente respinto come una delle loro irregolarità. Ma non nascondo le enormi difficoltà di farlo nelle particolari condizioni della Palestina. In effetti, la più grande delle vere difficoltà del sionismo è che esso deve realizzarsi in Sion. Vi sono tuttavia altre difficoltà, le quali, quando non sono specificamente colpa dei sionisti, sono in larga misura colpa degli ebrei. La peggiore è l’impressione generale di una pressione affaristica proveniente dal tipo di ebreo più brutale e affarista, che suscita un’indignazione violentissima e giustissima. Quando mi trovavo a Gerusalemme si diceva apertamente che i finanzieri ebrei si erano lamentati del basso tasso d’interesse a cui il governo concedeva prestiti ai contadini, e persino che il governo avesse ceduto alle loro pressioni. Se ciò fosse vero, sarebbe stato un rimprovero più grave per il governo ancora che per gli ebrei. Ma la verità generale è che un simile stato d’animo sembra rendere praticamente impossibile il patriottismo semplice e solido di una nazione ebraica palestinese, e ci costringe a considerare qualche alternativa o qualche compromesso. La più assennata formulazione di un compromesso che io abbia udito tra i sionisti mi fu suggerita dal dottor Weizmann, uomo non solo assai intelligente ma anche ardente e sensibile. E la frase da lui usata offre la chiave della mia stessa rozza concezione di una possibile soluzione, benché egli stesso probabilmente non l’accetterebbe.
Il dottor Weizmann suggeriva, se l’ho inteso bene, di non credere che la Palestina potesse essere un territorio nazionale unico e semplice del tutto nel senso in cui lo è la Francia; ma non vedeva perché non dovesse essere una confederazione di cantoni alla maniera della Svizzera. Alcuni di questi potrebbero essere cantoni ebraici, altri cantoni arabi, e così via a seconda del tipo di popolazione. Ciò è di per sé più ragionevole di molto altro che si propone dalla stessa parte; ma il suo interesse, per il mio proprio scopo, è più particolare. Questa idea, che rappresenti o no correttamente il pensiero del dottor Weizmann, comporta chiaramente l’abbandono della solidarietà della Palestina, e tollera l’idea che gruppi di ebrei siano separati gli uni dagli altri da popolazioni di tipo diverso. Ora, se una volta si consideri ammissibile questa nozione, mi sembra suscettibile di considerevole estensione. Sembra possibile che vi possano essere non solo cantoni ebraici in Palestina, ma cantoni ebraici fuori dalla Palestina, colonie ebraiche in luoghi adatti e prescelti nelle regioni adiacenti o in molte altre parti del mondo. Potrebbero essere affiliate a qualche centro ufficiale in Palestina, o persino a Gerusalemme, dove naturalmente vi sarebbe almeno qualche grande sede religiosa della razza e della religione disperse. La natura di quel centro religioso spetta agli ebrei deciderla; ma penso che, se fossi ebreo, edificherei il Tempio senza preoccuparmi del luogo del Tempio. Che essi debbano avere l’antico sito, s’intende, non è nemmeno da pensarsi; scatenerebbe una Guerra Santa dal Marocco fino alle marche della Cina. Ma poiché alcune delle più grandi imprese d’Israele furono compiute, e alcuni dei più gloriosi canti d’Israele furono cantati, quando il loro unico tempio era una cassa portata in giro nel deserto, non posso credere che il semplice spostamento del luogo del sacrificio debba significare per quella tradizione storica tanto quanto significherebbe per molte altre. Che gli ebrei abbiano in Palestina qualche alto luogo di dignità e di rito, come un grande edificio quale la Moschea di Omar, è certamente giusto e ragionevole; giacché con nessuna teoria si può liquidare il loro legame storico. Ritengo che sia sofisma dire, come fanno certi antisemiti, che gli ebrei non hanno più diritto di stare là dei Gebusei. Se vi sono dei Gebusei, essi sono Gebusei senza saperlo. Lo ritengo sufficientemente confutato dalla bella frase di un sacerdote inglese, per molti versi più antisemita di me: «Il popolo che ricorda ha un diritto». Anche i peggiori degli ebrei, così come i migliori, in qualche senso ricordano. Sono odiati, perseguitati e costretti dalla paura a falsi nomi e a doppie vite; ma ricordano. Mentono, imbrogliano, tradiscono, opprimono; ma ricordano. Quanto più ci accada di odiare tali elementi tra gli ebrei, tanto più ammiriamo gli elementi virili e magnifici tra le più vaghe e vaganti tribù della Palestina, tanto più dobbiamo ammettere quel paradosso. Gli ineroici hanno la memoria eroica; e i popoli eroici non hanno memoria.
Ma qualunque cosa la nazione ebraica volesse fare riguardo a un santuario nazionale o ad altro centro supremo, la proposta per il momento è che qualcosa come uno schema territoriale ebraico potrebbe davvero essere tentato, se permettessimo agli ebrei di essere dispersi non più come individui ma come gruppi. Sembra possibile che con qualche siffatta estensione della definizione di sionismo si possa infine superare anche la più grande difficoltà del sionismo, la difficoltà di reinsediare un numero sufficiente di una razza così grande su una terra così piccola. Poiché, se il vantaggio dell’ideale per gli ebrei è di guadagnare la terra promessa, il vantaggio per i Gentili è di liberarsi del problema ebraico, e non vedo perché dovremmo ottenere tutto il loro vantaggio e niente del nostro. Perciò lascerei quanti meno ebrei possibile nelle altre nazioni costituite, e a questi darei una posizione speciale meglio descritta come privilegio; una sorta di enclave auto-governata con leggi ed esenzioni speciali; per esempio, li dispenserei certamente dalla coscrizione, che nel loro caso ritengo una grave ingiustizia. [Nota: Naturalmente l’esule privilegiato perderebbe anche i diritti del nativo.] Un ebreo potrebbe essere trattato con lo stesso rispetto di un ambasciatore straniero, ma un ambasciatore straniero è uno straniero. Infine, darei la stessa posizione privilegiata a tutti gli ebrei ovunque, come politica alternativa al sionismo, se il sionismo fallisse alla prova che ho nominato; l’unica prova vera e l’unica tollerabile; se gli ebrei non fossero tanto falliti come contadini quanto riusciti come capitalisti.
There is one word to be added; it will be noted that inevitably and even against some of my own desires, the argument has returned to that recurrent conclusion, which was found in the Roman Empire and the Crusades. The European can do justice to the Jew; but it must be the European who does it. Such a possibility as I have thrown out, and any other possibility that any one can think of, becomes at once impossible without some idea of a general suzerainty of Christendom over the lands of the Moslem and the Jew. Personally, I think it would be better if it were a general suzerainty of Christendom, rather than a particular supremacy of England. And I feel this, not from a desire to restrain the English power, but rather from a desire to defend it. I think there is not a little danger to England in the diplomatic situation involved; but that is a diplomatic question that it is neither within my power or duty to discuss adequately. But if I think it would be wiser for France and England together to 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 Jerusalem sitting 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 last and best attempt at a rationalistic theory of the Jew. We should be left facing a mystery which no other rationalism has ever come so near to providing within rational cause and cure. Whatever we do, we shall not return to that insular innocence and comfortable unconsciousness of Christendom, in which the Victorian agnostics could suppose that the Semitic problem was a brief medieval insanity. In this as in greater things, even if we lost our faith we could not recover our agnosticism. We can never recover agnosticism, any more than any other kind of ignorance. We know that there is a Jewish problem; we only hope that there is a Jewish solution. If there is not, there is no other. We cannot believe again that the Jew is an Englishman with certain theological theories, any more than we can believe again any other part of 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 we can 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 well as mysterious; that whether in the sense of the sorrows of Christ or of the sorrows of Cain, he must pass by, for he belongs to God.
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CONCLUSION
To have worn a large scallop shell in my hat in the streets of London might have been deemed ostentatious, to say nothing of carrying a staff like a long pole; and wearing sandals might have proclaimed rather that I had not come from Jerusalem but from Letchworth, which some identify with the New Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God. Lacking such attributes, I passed through South England as one who might have come from Ramsgate or from anywhere; and the only symbol left to me of my pilgrimage was a cheap ring of metal coloured like copper and brass. For on it was written in Greek characters the word “Jerusalem,” and though it may be less valuable than a brass nail, I do not think you can buy it in the Strand. All those enormous and everlasting things, all those gates of bronze and mosaics of purple and peacock colouring, all those chapels of gold and columns of crimson marble, had all shrivelled up and dwindled down to that one small thread of red metal round my finger. I could not help having a feeling, like Aladdin, that if I rubbed 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 impression of it is really rather changing, with its wandering tribes and its shifting sands, in which the genii of the East might well build the palace or the paradise of a day. As I saw the low and solid English cottages rising around me amid damp delightful thickets under rainy skies, I felt that in a deeper sense it is rather we 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 indescribable thought which had circled round my head through most of my journey; that Christendom is like a gigantic bronze come out of the furnace of the Near East; that in Asia is only the fire and in Europe the form. The nearest to what I mean was suggested in that very striking book Form and Colour, by Mr. March Philips. When I spoke of the idols of Asia, many moderns may well have murmured against 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 with the enthusiasm for a nice green or yellow idol, with nine arms and three heads, than with the philosophy ultimately represented by the snake devouring his tail; the awful sceptical argument in 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 one thing that has been in that mystical circle and broken out of it, and become something real as well. It has gone westward by a sort of centrifugal force, like a stone from a sling; and so made the 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 felt strongly disposed to take the privileges of one. I wanted to be entertained at the firesides of total strangers, in the medieval manner, and to tell them interminable tales of my travels. I wanted to linger in Dover, and try it on the citizens of that town. I nearly got out of the train at several wayside stations, where I saw secluded cottages 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 travels that seemed in comparison as vast as the spaces between the stars. The hop-fields of Kent seemed to me like outlying parts of my own kitchen 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 dropping over the beechwoods and the white cross-roads. The distance seemed to grow deeper and richer with darkness as I went up the long lanes towards my home; and in that distance, as I drew nearer, I heard the barking of a dog.
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THE END
Resta da aggiungere una parola; si noterà come, inevitabilmente e persino contro alcuni dei miei stessi desideri, l’argomento sia tornato a quella conclusione ricorrente, che già si trovava nell’Impero Romano e nelle Crociate. L’europeo può rendere giustizia all’ebreo; ma dev’essere l’europeo a farlo. Una possibilità come quella che ho prospettato, e ogni altra possibilità che chiunque possa immaginare, diventa immediatamente impossibile senza qualche idea di una generale sovranità della Cristianità sulle terre del musulmano e dell’ebreo. Personalmente, penso che sarebbe meglio se fosse una generale sovranità della Cristianità, piuttosto che una particolare supremazia dell’Inghilterra. E ciò lo sento, non per un desiderio di frenare la potenza inglese, ma piuttosto per un desiderio di difenderla. Penso che vi sia non poco pericolo per l’Inghilterra nella situazione diplomatica implicata; ma questa è una questione diplomatica che non è né in mio potere né mio dovere discutere adeguatamente. Ma se penso che sarebbe più saggio per la Francia e l’Inghilterra insieme tenere insieme la Siria e la Palestina piuttosto che separatamente, ciò non fa che completare e suggellare la conclusione che mi ha ossessionato, con ricorrenza quasi perturbante, da quando vidi per la prima volta Gerusalemme posarsi sul colle come una città turrita d’Inghilterra o di Francia; e per un istante la sua cupola scura fu di nuovo il Templum Domini, e la torre su di essa fu la Torre di Tancredi.
Comunque, col fallimento del Sionismo cadrebbe l’ultimo e migliore tentativo di una teoria razionalistica dell’ebreo. Ci resterebbe da fronteggiare un mistero cui nessun altro razionalismo si è mai avvicinato tanto nel fornire causa e cura razionali entro la ragione. Qualunque cosa facciamo, non torneremo a quell’insulare innocenza e comoda incoscienza della Cristianità, in cui gli agnostici vittoriani potevano supporre che il problema semitico fosse una breve follia medievale. In questo come in cose più grandi, anche se perdessimo la nostra fede non potremmo recuperare il nostro agnosticismo. Non potremo mai recuperare l’agnosticismo, non più di qualunque altra specie di ignoranza. Sappiamo che esiste un problema ebraico; ci limitiamo a sperare che vi sia una soluzione ebraica. Se non c’è, non ve n’è alcun’altra. Non possiamo più credere che l’ebreo sia un inglese con certe teorie teologiche, non più di quanto possiamo credere di nuovo a qualunque altra parte del materialismo ottimistico il cui tempio è l’Albert Memorial. Uno schema di corporazioni può essere tentato e può fallire; ma mai più potremo rispettare il puro Capitalismo per il suo successo. Un attacco può essere sferrato alla corruzione politica, e può fallire; ma mai più potremo credere che la nostra politica non sia corrotta. E così il Sionismo può essere tentato e può fallire; ma mai più potremo noi stessi essere a nostro agio in Sion. O piuttosto, dovrei dire, se l’ebreo non può essere a suo agio in Sion noi non potremo mai più persuaderci che egli sia a suo agio fuori di Sion. Possiamo soltanto salutare al suo passare quella figura inquieta e misteriosa, sapendo finalmente che in lui dev’esservi qualcosa di mistico tanto quanto di misterioso; che sia nel senso dei dolori di Cristo o dei dolori di Caino, egli deve passare oltre, poiché appartiene a Dio.
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CONCLUSIONE
Aver portato un grande guscio di cappasanta sul cappello per le strade di Londra sarebbe forse stato giudicato ostentato, per non dire del portare un bordone come una lunga pertica; e l’indossare sandali avrebbe forse proclamato piuttosto che io non venivo da Gerusalemme ma da Letchworth, che alcuni identificano con la Nuova Gerusalemme discendente dal cielo da Dio. Privo di tali attributi, attraversai l’Inghilterra meridionale come uno che avrebbe potuto venire da Ramsgate o da chissà dove; e il solo simbolo rimastomi del mio pellegrinaggio era un anello dozzinale di metallo colorato come rame e ottone. Poiché su di esso era scritta in caratteri greci la parola «Gerusalemme», e per quanto possa valere meno di un chiodo d’ottone, non credo lo si possa comprare nello Strand. Tutte quelle cose enormi ed eterne, tutte quelle porte di bronzo e mosaici di porpora e colori di pavone, tutte quelle cappelle d’oro e colonne di marmo cremisi, si erano tutte raggrinzite e ridotte a quell’unico piccolo filo di metallo rosso intorno al mio dito. Non potevo fare a meno di provare una sensazione, come Aladino, che se avessi strofinato l’anello forse tutte quelle torri sarebbero risorte. E c’era una sorta di sentimento di verità in quella fantasia, dopotutto. Parliamo dell’Oriente immutabile; ma in un senso l’impressione che ne abbiamo è in realtà piuttosto mutevole, con le sue tribù erranti e le sue sabbie cangianti, in cui i geni dell’Oriente potrebbero ben edificare il palazzo o il paradiso di un giorno. Mentre vedevo i bassi e solidi cottage inglesi sorgere intorno a me tra umidi deliziosi boschetti sotto cieli piovosi, sentivo che in un senso più profondo siamo piuttosto noi a costruire per la permanenza o almeno per una sorta di pace. È qualcosa di più della comodità; una contentezza relativa e ragionevole. E mi tornò addosso come un boomerang un pensiero piuttosto indescrivibile che mi aveva girato intorno al capo per gran parte del mio viaggio; che la Cristianità è come un gigantesco bronzo uscito dalla fornace del Vicino Oriente; che in Asia vi è soltanto il fuoco e in Europa la forma. Ciò che più si avvicina a quel che intendo fu suggerito in quel libro assai notevole, Form and Colour, del signor March Philips. Quando parlai degli idoli dell’Asia, molti moderni possono ben aver mormorato contro una simile descrizione degli ideali di Buddha o della signora Besant. Al che posso soltanto rispondere che qualcosa degli ideali lo conosco, e credo di preferire gli idoli. Ho assai più simpatia per l’entusiasmo verso un bel idolo verde o giallo, con nove braccia e tre teste, che per la filosofia rappresentata da ultimo dal serpente che divora la propria coda; il terribile argomento scettico in cerchio per cui tutto comincia e finisce nella mente. Preferirei di gran lunga essere un adoratore di feticci e divertirmi un poco, piuttosto che essere un pessimista orientale tenuto a sorridere sempre come un ottimista. Ora mi pare che il combattivo credo cristiano sia l’unica cosa che sia stata in quel cerchio mistico e ne sia uscita, divenendo anche qualcosa di reale. È andato verso occidente per una sorta di forza centrifuga, come una pietra dalla fionda; e così ha fatto sì che la rotante mente orientale, come disse il francescano a Gerusalemme, facesse infine qualcosa.
Comunque, benché non recassi nessuno degli ornamenti del pellegrino, mi sentivo fortemente disposto a prendermene i privilegi. Volevo essere accolto ai focolari di perfetti sconosciuti, alla maniera medievale, e narrare loro interminabili racconti dei miei viaggi. Volevo indugiare a Dover, e provarci con i cittadini di quella città. Per poco non scesi dal treno in parecchie stazioncine lungo la via, dove vedevo appartati cottage che avrebbero potuto essere rallegrati da un po’ di notizie dalla Terra Santa. Poiché mi pareva che tutti i miei compatrioti dovessero essere miei amici; tutti questi luoghi inglesi si erano fatti assai più vicini fra loro dopo viaggi che al confronto parevano vasti come gli spazi fra le stelle. I campi di luppolo del Kent mi parevano parti periferiche del mio stesso orto domestico; e Londra stessa situata davvero all’estremità di Londra. Londra era forse il più grande dei sobborghi di Beaconsfield. Nel tempo in cui giunsi a Beaconsfield stessa, il crepuscolo calava sui boschi di faggi e i bianchi crocevia. La distanza pareva farsi più profonda e più ricca di oscurità man mano che salivo per i lunghi sentieri verso casa mia; e in quella distanza, mentre mi avvicinavo, udii l’abbaiare di un cane.
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FINE