|The Berbers|
As he so wanders, he is taken with a strong desire to grasp the whole place at one view as it stood just before the barbarians came, and to see what the Vandals saw: to look up the valley from the rock of Cirta with the temples on the edge of either precipice and to see the towns re-arise. There are men who have felt this desire in Italy, but in Africa it is a much stronger desire, and since Africa is strange and very empty, perhaps by watching long enough at night that desire might be fulfilled.
Rome not only governed, but also made, Africa. The foundations on which the Maghreb is laid, and to which it must return, are Roman; the Berber race was no conscious part of us. I have said that it did not know itself until the Romans came, and when they came the Berbers slipped into the Roman unity more slowly and with more political friction, (but with less rebellion and therefore less proof of ill-ease,) than did the Gauls.There is no more symbolic picture in the history of the Maghreb than the picture of Scipio clothing in the Roman dress that Massinissa, his ally, the king of the nomads who rode without stirrups or bridle.
|The Arabs|
The Berbers were not destined to preserve their Roman dignity. Something barbaric in them, something of the boundaries, of the marches, planted in these men (though they were, and still are, of our own kind) a genius for revolt. Let it be noted that in Africa every heresy arose. That Africa admitted the Vandals by treason, and that even when Africa accepted Islam, sect upon sect divided its history. Africa has always stood to the rest of the Empire as a sort of ne’er-do-weel: a younger son perpetually asking for adventure and rejecting discipline. To this the Roman horror of the sea lent a peculiar aid. Like Britain, Africa was cut off from the mainland. Like Britain, Africa was destined in the disruption of the Empire to lose theRoman idiom and the traditions of orderly life; but with this difference, that Britain was reconquered by the religion and the manner of Europe within three generations of its loss: Africa was finally invaded, not by dull barbarians staring at the City and humble before her name, but by a brilliant cavalcade which galloped, driven forward by high convictions. The Arabs came in the seventh century, like a sort of youth contemptuous of the declining head of Rome. Barbary, then, I repeat, was swept into the Arabian language and religion in one cavalry charge, and that language and religion not only became immediately the masters of its people, but had twelve hundred years in which to take root and make a soil.
For about five hundred years, from a little after the birth of Our Lord to the close of the sixth century, our culture had been universal among the Berbers. In the last three centuries the Faith was dominant.But rebellion was in them, and when the Arabs came the whole edifice suddenly crumbled.
Asia, which had first sailed in by sea and had been destroyed, or rather obliterated, when Carthage fell, came in now from the desert; Asia was like an enemy who is driven out of one vantage, and then, after a breathing-space, makes entry by another. But in such a struggle the periods of success and failure are longer than those of sieges, and even than the lives of kingdoms. The Maghreb, our test of sovereignty, had admitted the Phœnician for some six or seven hundred years. It had been thoroughly welded into Rome for five hundred. The Vandals came, and did no more than any other wandering tribe: they stirred the final anarchy a little; they were at once absorbed. But the tenacity by which Gaul, Britain, Spain and the Rhine were to slough off the memories of decay and to attain their owncivilisation again after the repose of the Dark Ages—that tenacity was not in the nature of Barbary.
In the seventh and eighth centuries, when all the remainder of the west had fallen, when Italy was already taxed and half governed by a few Germans, when Gaul and Spain had at their heads small bands of mixed barbarian and Roman nobles, and when everything seemed gone to ruin, this southern shore of the Mediterranean was overwhelmed and, what is more, persuaded.
There came riding upon it out of the desert continual lines of horsemen whom these horsemen of Numidia could mix with and understand. The newcomers wore the white wrapping of the south: all their ways were southern ways, suited to the intensity of the sun, and Barbary, or the main part of it, was southern and burning. Their eyes were very bright, and in their ornaments the half-tamedtribesmen recognised an old appetite for splendour. For all the effect of Rome perhaps one-third of the African provincials were still nomadic when the Arabs appeared, and that nomadic part was thickest towards the desert from which the invasion came; the invaders themselves were nomads, and even on the shore of the Maghreb, where men had abandoned the nomadic habit, the instinct of roving still lingered.
Islam, therefore, when it first came in, tore up what Rome had planted as one tears up a European shrub planted in the friable soil of Africa.
The Bedawin, as they rode, bore with them also a violent and simple creed. And here, again, a metaphor drawn from the rare vegetation of this province can alone define the character of their arrival. Their Faith was like some plant out of the solitudes; it was hard in surface; it was simple in form; it was fitted rather to endure than to grow. It wasconsonant with the waterless horizons and the blinding rocks from which it had sprung. Its victory was immediate. Before Charlemagne was born the whole fabric of our effort in Barbary, the traditions of St. Augustine and of Scipio, had utterly disappeared. No one from that time onwards could build a Roman arch of stone or drive a straight road from city to city or recite so much as the permanent axioms of the Roman Law.
Elsewhere, in Syria and in Asia and in Spain, the Mohammedans failed to extirpate Christianity, and were able for some centuries to enjoy the craftsmanship and the sense of order which their European subjects could lend them. It was only here, in Africa, that their victory was complete. Therefore it is only here, in Africa, that you see what such a victory meant, and how, when it was final, all power of creation disappeared. The works which have renderedIslam a sort of lure for Europe were works that could not have been achieved save by European hands.
The Roman towns did not decay; they were immediately abandoned. Gradually the wells filled; the forests were felled in bulk; none were replanted. Of the Olive Gardens, the stone presses alone remain. One may find them still beneath the sand, recalling the fat of oil. But there, to-day, not a spear of grass will grow, and the Sahara has already crept in. The olives long ago were cut down for waste, or for building or for burning. There was not in any other province of the empire so complete an oblivion, nor is there any better example of all that “scientific” history denies: for it is an example of the cataclysmic—of the complete and rapid changes by which history alone is explicable: of the folly of accepting language as a test of origin: of the might and rapidity of religion (which islike a fire): of its mastery over race (which is like the mastery of fire over the vessels it fuses or anneals): of the hierarchic nature of conquest: of the easy destruction of more complex by simpler forms....
|The Atlas|
If one is to understand this surprising history of Barbary, and to know both what the Romans did in it and what the Arabs did, and to grasp what the reconquest has done or is attempting to do, it is necessary to examine the physical nature of this land.
|The Relief of Barbary|
Along all its hundreds of miles, the Maghreb is determined by Mount Atlas, or rather, the Maghreb is Atlas itself standing huge between the Sahara and the sea. It is a bulk of mountains so formed that one may compare it to a city wall with a broad top for fighting men to move on and a parapet along both the inner and the outer edges. The outer parapet, which is called “TheLittle Atlas,” runs along the Mediterranean shore: the inner parapet, which is called “The Great Atlas,” runs along the desert, and is usually the higher of the two chains. These two chains do not run quite parallel, but converge towards Tunis and spread apart towards the Atlantic; the tableland between them, which is called “The High Plateaux,” and is in some places three thousand feet above the sea, broadens therefore from less than a hundred to well over two hundred miles across; but at either end it somewhat changes its character, for at the Tunis end it is too narrow to be a true plateau and becomes a jumble of mountains where the Greater and the Lesser Atlas meet, while in Morocco it becomes too broad to maintain its character and is diversified by continual subsidiary ranges. But in between these two extremities it is a true tableland with isolated summits rising here and there from it, and at their feet shallowand brackish lakes calledShotts, round which are rims of marshy reeds and, in summer, gleaming sheets of salt. For there is no drainage away from the tableland to the desert or to the sea, save where, here and there, a torrent (such as the Chélif or the Rummel) digs itself an erratic gorge and escapes through the coast range to the Mediterranean. These exceptions are very rare and they do not disturb the general plan of the country, which is everywhere constructed of the Atlas running in two ranges that hold up between them the plateau with its salt lakes and isolated groups of hills.
|The Tableland|
If, therefore, one were to take a section anywhere from north to south, from the Mediterranean to the Sahara, one would get some such figure as this:
where the perpendicular shading on the left is the Mediterranean slope and drainage, the horizontal shading on the right, the desert slope, and where the Little Atlas is markedA, the Great AtlasB(falling down toE, the dunes of the Sahara), where atCis one of the isolated hills of the tableland, and atDandDa couple of those salt lakes which add so strongly to the desolation of these upland plains.
The High Plateaux, which, empty as they are, make up the body of the Maghreb, are not only a reality to the geographer: their peculiar character is also apparent to everytraveller who crosses them. The rise up to them from the Mediterranean, though confused, is observable; the fall from them to the Sahara is violent, and, through its central part, dramatic. It is not unusual for a man who has traversed this tableland upon more than one voyage to recall clefts in the southern and the northern ranges so placed that they were like windows through which one could look down upon the lower world.
These clefts resemble each other strangely. From the one a man sees the steps of limestone, the desert cliffs, touched rarely and more rarely by the green of palm-treesand ending southward, glaring and arid and sharp, against the extremity of the horizon. From the other, he sees the woods of the coast, dense and well watered, mixing with the rocks about him, and right beyond the valley the pleasant line of the sea. But each of the views he carries in his mind has this in common, that he has seen it from a height, and looked down suddenly from a mountain tableland upon a flat below: to the north upon a level of waves over which went the shadows of clouds: to the south upon a level of sand stretching under a small and awful sun.
If a man were to live in this land, the High Plateaux would fill up the most of his mind, as they take up by far the most of the country itself in space. One is compelled to move when one is upon them. There is no resting-place: only, along the far edge, before the fall into the desert begins, the ruins of the Roman frontier towns. Thesewastes hold the soul of Numidia. The horses of Barbary are native to them. It is said that these horses sicken on the seaboard—certainly their race dies on the northern shores of the Mediterranean unless it is crossed with one of our coarser breeds—for they were born to breathe this dry air and to make rapid prints with their unshod hoofs upon the powder of the plains and the salt.
The tableland, then, is the heart of the Maghreb, yet it has no name, not even among the wandering Arabs.
These come up on to it in spring from the hot desert below, driving slow files of proud and foolish camels. They pasture flocks in among the brushwood and by the rare streams; then when the autumn descends and the first cold appals them, before the winter scurries across these flats, they turn back and patiently go down the mountain roads into the Sahara, leaving the Berbers to themselvesagain. For four months the plains above are swept with snow, and a traveller in that season, feeling the sharp and frozen dust in his face before the gale, and seeing far off bare cones of standing hills above salt marshes, thinks himself rather in Idaho or Nevada than here in Africa which Europe thinks so warm.
|The Tell|
That belt of coast upon which Atlas descends is of a nature quite distinct from the High Plateaux. The Americans can match such sudden contrasts: we in Europe have nothing of the kind. You come down from salt water to fresh, from a cold (or from a burning) to a genial air, and you enter as you sink from the tableland a territory of great luxuriance. It is called the Tell, and to seize its character it is necessary to modify and to develop somewhat one’s idea of the mountain chains. For though the Greater and the Lesser Atlas run in those main lines which appear in the little sketch upon page58,yet in detail each range, and especially the range along the sea, is broken and complex, and is made up of a number of separate folds, sometimes parallel and sometimes overlapping, thus:
|The Mountains|
Moreover, the heights are irregular. There are groups of high peaks and ridges against the desert to the east in the Aurès Mountains, and to the west in those of Morocco, while along the seaboard great bulges of mountain rise in places from the Lower Atlas to a height rivalling the inland range. For instance, where anXis marked upon the sketch map, there is an almost isolated mass known as the Djurdjura, very high, almostas high as Aurès, which stands up 150 miles behind it above the Sahara.|The Berber Strongholds|It was in these groups of higher and more rugged hills along the seaboard or the desert that the native languages and perhaps the purity of the native race took refuge both during the Roman occupation and during the Arabian conquest. It is in these ravines that the ancient tongue is spoken to this day. It is there that the Berber type, though it is still everywhere what we ourselves are, has maintained itself least mixed with the foreigner: it is even, perhaps, allied in these hills with a people older than we or the Berber can be.
|The Bays of the Tell|
The fact that the Lesser Atlas thus faces close upon the sea and falls upon it abruptly, determines an abundant rainfall upon the Tell, and makes it fruitful. The fact that the Lesser Atlas consists of folds overlapping each other and running from north-east to south-west has furnished a multitude of bays, each lying between two spurs of the hills. Everysuch bay has a harbour more or less important, and that harbour is nearly always upon the westerly side; for the prevalent strong wind, which is from the east, drives a current with it, and this current scours out the bays, clearing up and deepening the westerly shore, but leaving the eastern shallow. Thus Bone, Philippeville, Algiers, Calle, and Utica itself, which was the oldest of all, are on the westerly sides of such bays. Into each bay a mountain torrent falls, or sometimes a larger stream, and the long process of erosion has scoured all the coast into a network of valleys, so that, unless one has a clear view of the scheme in one’s mind, one is bewildered and does not always know at what point in the upward journey one passes from the Tell to the High Plateaux, distinct as these regions are.
|The Physical Constitution Of the Tell|
Thus a simple plan of a portion of the Tell is as given on thefollowing page, where the line of crosses indicates the watershedbetween the Mediterranean and the inland drainage of the High Plateaux.
|The New Vineyard|
But if one were to mark on this map a stippled surface for contours under five hundred feet, a hatched one for the same between five and fifteen hundred, a black one up to two thousand five hundred, and above that leave the heights in white with little triangles for the summits, one would get some such complicated scheme as is shown on theopposite page, where it will be seen that a high mountain (atC) overlooks the shore far from the watershed, and the scheme of valleys is complex and might seem a labyrinth to aman on foot without a map. AtAandBare the ports of each bay, and near to each at the mouth of either river a large plain such as is characteristic of the heads of all these inlets. Their earth is black, deep, and fertile: inviting the plough. Such fields fed Utica, Icosium and Hippo Regius and Cæsarea. They remained wild and abandoned for over a thousand years, but to-day you may see miles of vineyards planted in rows that run converging to the limits of the plain, where, until this last generation, no one had dug or pruned or gathered or pressedsince the Latin language was forgotten in these lands. Indeed, it would be possible for a fantastic man to see in this replanting of the vine a symbol of the joy of Europe returning; for everywhere the people of the desert have had a fear of wine, and their powerful legends have affected us also in the north for a time. But the vine is in Africa again. It will not soon be uprooted.
Such plains, then, their rivers and their adjacent seaport towns, make up the Tell, in which the Romans nourished many millions and in which the most part of the reconstituted province will at last build its homes.
By such a bay and entering such a harbour, whoever comes to Africa reaches land.
|The Bay of Hippo|
It is perhaps at Bone, which stands to half a mile where Hippo stood, that the best introduction to Africa is offered. Here a mountain of conspicuous height rules an open roadstead full of shipping small andlarge, and fenced round with houses for very many miles. A far promontory on the eastern side faces the western mountain, and half protects the harbour from summer gales. Below the mountain, the plain belonging to this bay stretches in a large half-circle, marked only here and there with buildings but planted everywhere with olives, vines and corn. In the midst of this great flat stands up a little isolated hill, a sort of acropolis, and from its summit, from a window of his monastery there, St. Augustine, looking at that sea, wroteUbi magnitudo, ibi veritas.
|Hippo|
The town is utterly gone. There are those who argue that this or that was not done as history relates, because of this or that no vestige remains; and if tradition tells them that Rome built here or there, they deny it, because they cannot find walls, however much they dig (within the funds their patrons allow them). These men are common in the universities of Europe. They are paid to be common. They should see Hippo.
Here was a great town of the Empire. It detained the host of Vandals, slaves and nomads for a year. It was the seat of the most famous bishopric of its day, and within its walls, while the siege still endured, St. Augustine died. It counted more than Palermo or Genoa: almost as much as Narbonne. It has completely disappeared. There are not a few bricks scattered, nor a line of Roman tiles built into a wall. There is nothing. A farmer in his ploughing oncedisturbed a few fragments of mosaic, but that is all: they can make a better show at Bignor in the Sussex weald, where an unlucky company officer shivered out his time of service with perhaps a hundred men.
|Calama|
In the heart of the Tell, behind the mountains which hide the sea, yet right in the storms of the sea, in its clouds and weather, stands a little town which was called Calama in the Roman time and is now, since the Arabs, called Guelma.
It is the centre of that belt of hills. A broad valley, one of the hundreds which build up the complicated pattern of the Mediterranean slope, lies before the platform upon which the fortress rose. A muddy river nourishes it, and all the plain is covered with the new farms and vineyards—beyond them the summits and the shoulders that make a tumbled landscape everywhere along the northern shores of Africa guard the place whichever way one turns.From the end of every street one sees a mountain.
If a man had but one day in which to judge the nature of the province, he could not do better than come to this town upon some winter evening when it was already dark, and wake next morning to see the hurrying sky and large grey hills lifting up into that sky all around and catching the riot of its clouds. It is high and cold: there is a spread of pasture in its fields and a sense of Europe in the air. No device in the architecture indicates an excessive heat in summer and even the trees are those of Italy or of Provence. Its site is a survival from the good time when the Empire packed this soil with the cities of which so great a number have disappeared: it is also a promise of what the near future may produce, a new harvest of settled and wealthy walls, for it is in the refounding of such municipalities that the tradition of Europe will work upon Africaand not in barren adventure southward towards a sky which is unendurable to our race and under which we can never build and can hardly govern.
Guelma is typical in every way. It was Berber before the Romans came, but nothing remains of its founders or of whatever punic influence its first centuries may have felt. Of Rome so much endures that the heavy walls and the arches are, as it were, the framework of the place.
|The Permanence of Rome|
In the citadel a great fragment larger than anything else in the town runs right across the soldiers’ quarters, pierced with the solid arches that once supported the palaceof Calama. Only the woodwork has disappeared. The stones which supported the flooring still stand out unbroken, and the whole wall, though it is not very high—hardly higher than the big barracks around it—remains in the mind, as though it had a right to occupy one’s memory of the Kasbah by a sort of majesty which nothing that has been built since its time has inherited. Here, as throughout the Empire, the impression of Rome is as indefinable as it is profound, but one can connect some part of it at least with the magnitude of the stones and the ponderous simplicity of their courses, with the strength that the half-circle and the straight line convey, and with the double evidence of extreme antiquity and extreme endurance; for there is something awful in the sight of so many centuries visibly stamped upon the stone, and able to evoke every effect of age but not to compel decay.
This nameless character which is themark of the Empire, and carries, as it were, a hint of resurrection in it, is as strong in what has fallen as in what stands. A few bricks built at random into a mud wall bear the sign of Rome and proclaim her title: a little bronze unearthed at random in the rubbish heaps of the Rummel is a Roman Victory: a few flag-stones lying broken upon a deserted path in the woodlands is a Roman Road: nor do any of these fragments suggest the passing of an irrecoverable good, but rather its continued victory. To see so many witnesses small and great is not to remember a past or a lost excellence, but to become part of it and to be conscious of Rome all about one to-day. It is a surety also for the future to see such things.
|The Peasant’s Wall|
There is a field where this perpetuity and this escape from Time refresh the traveller with peculiar power. It is a field of grass in the uplands across which the wind blows with vigour towards distant hills. Here a peasantof the place (no one knows when, but long ago) fenced in his land with Roman stones. The decay of Islam had left him aimless, like all his peers. He could not build or design. He could not cut stone or mould brick. When he was compelled to enclose his pasture, the only material he could use was the work of the old masters who had trained his fathers but whom he had utterly forgotten or remembered only in the vague name of “Roum.” It was long before the reconquest that he laboriously raised that wall. Some shadow of Turkish power still ruled him from Constantine. No one yet had crossed the sea from Europe tomake good mortar or to saw in the quarries again. It is with a lively appreciation that one notes how all he did is perishing or has perished. The poor binding he put in has crumbled. The slabs slope here and there. But the edges of those stones, which are twenty times older than his effort, remain. They will fall again and lie where he found them; but they and the power that cut them are alike imperishable.
|The Landscape of Antiquity|
It has been said that the men of antiquity had no regard for landscape, and that those principal poems upon which all letters repose betray an indifference to horizons and to distant views. The objection is ill-found, for even the poems let show through their admirable restraint the same passion which we feel for hills, and especially for the hills of home: they speak also of land-falls and of returning exiles, and an Homeric man desired, as he journeyed, to see far off the smoke rising from his own fields and after that to die. Butmuch stronger than anything their careful verse can give us of this appetite for locality is the emplacement of their buildings.
|The Theatre of Calama|
Mr. March-Phillips has very well described the spirit which built a certain temple into the scenery of a Sicilian valley. Here (he says), in a place now deserted, the white pillars ornament a jutting tongue of land, and are so placed that all the lines of the gorge lead up to them, and that the shrine becomes the centre of a picture, and, as it were, of a composition. Of this antique consciousness of terrestrial beauty all southern Europe is full, and here in Guelma, upon an edge of the high town, the site of the theatre gives evidence of the same zeal.
The side of a hill was chosen, just where the platform of the city breaks down sharply upon the plain below. There, so that the people and the slaves upon the steps could have a worthy background for their plays, the half-circle of the auditorium was cut outlike a quarry from the ground. Beyond the actors, and giving a solemnity to the half-religious concourse of the spectators, the mountains of the Tell stood always up behind the scene, and the height, not only of those summits but of the steps above the plain, enhanced the words that were presented. We have to-day in Europe no such aids to the senses. We have no such alliance of the air and the clouds with our drama, nor even with our patriotism—such as the modern world has made it. The last centuries of the Empire had all these things in common: great verse inherited from an older time, good statuary, plentiful fountains, one religion, and the open sky. Therefore its memory has outlastedall intervening time, and it itself the Empire, (though this truth is as yet but half-received,) has re-arisen.
|The Greatness of The First Four Centuries|
There is one great note in the story of our race which the least learned man can at once appreciate, if he travels with keen eyes looking everywhere for antiquity, but which the most learned in their books perpetually ignore, and ignore more and more densely as research develops. That note is the magnitude of the first four centuries.
Everybody knows that the ancient world ran down into the completed Roman Empire as into a reservoir, and everybody knows that the modern world has flowed outwards from that reservoir by various channels. Everybody knows that this formation of a United Europe was hardly completed in the first century, that it was at last conscious of disintegration in the fifth. The first four centuries are therefore present as dates ineverybody’s mind, yet the significance of the dates is forgotten.
Historians have fallen into a barren contemplation of the Roman decline, and their readers with difficulty escape that attitude. Save in some few novels, no writer has attempted to stand in the shoes of the time and to see it as must have seen it the barber of Marcus Aurelius or the stud-groom of Sidonius’ Palace. We know what was coming, the men of the time knew it no more than we can know the future. We take at its own self-estimate that violent self-criticism which accompanies vitality, and we are content to see in these 400 years a process of mere decay.
The picture thus impressed upon us is certainly false. There is hardly a town whose physical history we can trace, that did not expand, especially towards the close of that time. There was hardly an industry or a class (notably the officials) that had not by an accumulation of experience grown to createupon a larger and a larger scale its peculiar contribution to the State; and far the larger part of the stuff of our own lives was created, or was preserved, by that period of unity.
That our European rivers are embanked and canalised, that we alone have roads, that we alone build well and permanently, that we alone in our art can almost attain reality, that we alone can judge all that we do by ideas, and that therefore we alone are not afraid of change and can develop from within—in a word, that we alone are Christians we derive from that time.
Our theory of political justice was partly formulated, partly handed on, by those generations; our whole scheme of law, our conceptions of human dignity and of right. Even in the details our structure of society descends from that source: we govern, or attempt to govern, by representation because the monastic institutions of the end of the Empire were under a necessity ofadopting that device: we associate the horse with arms and with nobility because the last of the Romans did so.
If a man will stand back in the time of the Antonines and will look around him and forward toward our own day, the consequence of the first four centuries will at once appear. He will see the unceasing expansion of the paved imperial ways. He will conceive those great Councils of the Church which would meet indifferently in centres 1500 miles apart, in the extremity of Spain or on the Bosphorus: a sort of moving city whose vast travel was not even noticed nor called a feat. He will be appalled by the vigour of the western mind between Augustus and Julian when he finds that it could comprehend and influence and treat as one vast State what is even now, after so many centuries of painful reconstruction, a mosaic of separate provinces. He will calculate with what rapidity and uniformity the orders of those emperors whoseem to us the lessening despots of a failing state were given upon the banks of the Euphrates, to be obeyed upon the Clyde. He will then appreciate why the Rome which Europe remembers, and upon which it is still founded, was not the Rome of literature with its tiny forum and its narrow village streets, but something gigantic like that vision which Du Bellay had of a figure with one foot upon the sunrise and its hands overspreading ocean.
Indeed this great poet expresses the thing more vividly by the sound of three lines of his than even the most vivid history could do.
“Telle que dans son char la BérycynthienneCouronnée de tours, et heureuse d’avoirEnfanté tant de dieux....”
“Telle que dans son char la BérycynthienneCouronnée de tours, et heureuse d’avoirEnfanté tant de dieux....”
“Telle que dans son char la BérycynthienneCouronnée de tours, et heureuse d’avoirEnfanté tant de dieux....”
“Telle que dans son char la Bérycynthienne
Couronnée de tours, et heureuse d’avoir
Enfanté tant de dieux....”
This was the might and the permanence from which we sprang.
To establish the character of the Empire and its creative mission is the less easy fromthe prejudice that has so long existed against the action of religion, and especially of that religion which the Empire embraced as its cataclysm approached. The acceptation of the creed is associated in every mind with the eclipse of knowledge and with a contempt for the delights which every mind now seeks. It is often thought the cause, always the companion, of decay, and so far has this sentiment proceeded that in reading books upon Augustine or upon Athanasius one might forget by what a sea and under what a sunlight the vast revolution was effected.
It is true that when every European element had mixed to form one pattern, things local and well done disappeared. The vague overwhelming and perhaps insoluble problems which concern not a city but the whole world, the discovery of human doom and of the nature and destiny of the soul, these occupied such minds as would in an earlier time have bent themselves to simplerand more feasible tasks than the search after finality. It is true that plastic art, and to a less extent letters, failed: for these fringes of life whose perfection depends upon detail demand for their occasional flowering small and happy States full of fixed dogmas and of certain usages. But though it lost the visible powers antiquity had known, the Empire at its end, when it turned to the contemplation of eternity, broadened much more than our moderns—who are enemies of its religious theory—will admit. The business which Rome undertook in her decline was so noble and upon so great a scale that when it had succeeded, then, in spite of other invasions, the continuity of Europe was saved. We absorbed the few barbarians of the fifth century, we had even the vitality to hold out in the terror and darkness of the ninth, and in the twelfth we re-arose. It was the character of the Western Empire during the first four centuries, and notably its character towardstheir close, which prevented the sleep of the Dark Ages from being a death. These first four centuries cast the mould which still constrains us; they formed our final creed, they fixed the routes of commerce and the sites of cities, and perpetually in the smallest trifles of topography you come across them still: the boundary of Normandy, as we know it to-day, was fixed by Diocletian. If there can be said of Europe what cannot be said of any other part of the world, that its civilisation never grew sterile and never disappeared, then we owe the power of saying such a thing to that long evening of the Mediterranean.
|The Arabic Influence|
If this pre-eminence of Rome in the process of her conversion is the lesson of all travel it is especially the lesson of Africa; and nowhere is that lesson taught more clear than in Guelma. Here also you may perceive how it was that the particular causewhich ruined the spirit of the Roman town also saved its stones, and you may feel, like an atmosphere, the lightness, the permeation, as it were, without pressure:—the perpetual fluid influence which overflowed the province upon the arrival of the Arabs. So that the bone of Rome remain, caught in a drift of ideas which, like fine desert sand, could preserve them for ever.
For the Arab did in Calama what he did throughout Barbary: he cast a spell. He did not destroy with savagery, he rather neglected all that he could afford to neglect. Here also he cut down timber, but he did not replant. Here also he let the water-pipes of the Romans run dry. Here also the Arab, who apparently achieved nothing material, imposed a command more powerful than the compulsion of any government or the fear of any conqueror: he sowed broadcast his religion and his language; his harvest grew at once; first it hid and at last it stifled the religionand the language he had found. The speech, and the faith which renders that speech sacred, transformed the soul of Barbary: they oppose between them a barrier to the reconquest more formidable by far than were the steppes and the nomads to the first advance of Rome. Of this impalpable veil which is spread between the native population and the new settlers the traveller is more readily aware in the little cities of the hills than in the larger towns of the coast. The external change of the last generation is apparent: the houses about him are European houses; the roads might be roads in France or Northern Italy. The general aspect of Guelma confirms that impression of modernity, nor is there much save the low loop-holed walls which surround the town, to remind one of Africa; but from the midst of its roofs rises the evidence of that religion which still holds and will continue to hold all its people. The only building upon which the efforts of anindolent creed have fastened is the mosque, and the minaret stands alone, conspicuous and central over all the European attempt, and mocks us.
Far off, where the walls and the barracks are confused into a general band of white, and no outline is salient enough to distinguish the modern from the ancient work of the place, this wholly Mohammedan shaft of stone marks the place for Mohammedan. It is an enduring challenge.
There is a triumph of influence which all of us have known and against which many of us have struggled. It is certainly not a force which one can resist, still less is it effected by (though it often accompanies) the success of armies.It is the pressure and at last the conquest of ideas when they have this three-fold power: first, that they are novel and attack those parts of the mind still sensitive; secondly, that they are expounded with conviction (conviction necessary to the conveyance of doctrine); and, thirdly, that they form a system and are final. Such was the triumph of the Arab.
Our jaded day, which must for ever be taking some drug or tickling itself with unaccustomed emotion, has pretended to discover in Islam, as it has pretended to discover in twenty other alien things, the plan of happiness; and a stupid northern admiration for whatever has excited the wonder or the curiosity of the traveller has made Mohammedism, as it has made Buddhism and God knows what other inferiorities or aberrations of human philosophy, the talk of drawing-rooms and the satisfaction of lethargic men. It is not in this spirit that a worthy tributecan be paid to the enormous invasion of the seventh century.
|The Arabic Invasion|
That invasion as a whole has failed. Christendom, for ever criticised, (for it is in its own nature to criticise itself,) has emerged; but if one would comprehend how sharp was the issue, one should read again all that was written between Charlemagne and the death of St. Louis. In the Song of Roland, in the “Gesta Francorum,” in Joinville, this new attack of Asia is present—formidable, and greater than ourselves; something which we hardly dared to conquer, which we thought we could not conquer, which the greatest of us thought he had failed in conquering. Islam was far more learned than we were, it was better equipped in arms and nevertheless more civic and more tolerant. When the last efforts of the crusades dragged back to Europe an evil memory of defeat, there was perhaps no doubt in those who despaired, still less in those who secretly delighted that such fantasies wereended—there was no doubt, I say, in their minds that the full re-establishment of our civilisation was impossible, and that the two rivals were destined to stand for ever one against the other: the invader checked and the invaded prudent; for, throughout the struggle we had always looked upon our rivals at least as equals and usually as superiors.
|Its Continued Influence|
It is in the most subtle expressions that the quarrel between the two philosophies appears. Continually Islam presses upon us without our knowing it. It made the Albigenses, it is raising here and there throughout European literature at this moment notes of determinism, just as that other influence from the Further East is raising notes of cruelty or of despair.
|The Gothic|
There is one point in which the contact between these master-enemies and ourselves is best apparent. They gave us the Gothic, and yet under our hands the Gothic became the most essentially European of all Europeanthings. Consider these two tiers of one Arabian building founded in Africa, while yet the vigour of that civilisation was strong. True, the work is not in stone but in plaster, for to work stone they needed an older civilisation than their own. But see how it is the origin of, or rather identical with, our ogive. By what is it that we recognise these intersecting segments (which are of the perfect 60° like our own) to be something foreign? And how is it that we know that no Christian could have built these things? Venice has windows like these: by just so much she is not of the West, and by just that innoculationperhaps she perished. The ecstasy of height, the self-development of form into further form, the grotesque, the sublime and the enthusiastic—all these things the Arab arch lacks as utterly as did the Arab spirit; yet the form is theirs and we obtained it from them. In this similarity and in these differences are contained and presented visibly the whole story of our contact with them and of our antagonism.