In the brilliant years of Tlemcen, during which it was a spray
of the flowering branch of Andalusian art, what is most striking
and remains on the mind with a touch of surprise is the sense of
the long and various contact of the Berber world with inherited
Mediterranean civilization. We are accustomed to think of the north
coast of Africa as a much-isolated country; but no place in the world
is ever so isolated as it may seem to be; and the connection of the
North African peoples with the centres of Christian history was never
broken from the first Christian ages. Some Christian communities were
encysted among the Berbers by the first Arab invasion; in the tenth
century there were still five bishoprics among them. Charlemagne
sent an embassy to Kairouan in respect to the relics of some saint
at Carthage, in the reign of Ibrahim, the Aglabite, who received
it with great splendor. The trade of the country was of vast
territorial extent, reaching the Soudan and Central Africa and the
furthest Mohammedan East; in the eleventh century negotiations were
entered into with the Papacy with a view to attracting Christian
merchants and markets. En-Nacer, a prince of the Hammadites, sent
presents to Gregory VII, including all his Christian slaves. The
contact with the Christians as enemies, in Sicily, Spain, and on
the sea, was incessant in the period of Moslem power. Christians,
too, made a part of the mercenary troops of the Moslem armies; the
Beni-Mérin are said to have had at one time twelve thousand such
troops, and Yarmorâsen had two thousand, who mutinied and were
slain; these were the last of the Christian cavalry in Moslem pay.
Contact with the old civilization was still more intimate and
continuous toward the East in commerce and the arts. The Berber
tribes of the coast had contained artisans from Roman times;
but the Arabs were from the beginning dependent on civilization
for all articles of luxury, and, especially in their religious
needs, for the architectural arts. The mosque was built on the
plan of Byzantine churches, and the Greeks and Persians became the
masters of construction and decoration in building; Roman temples
and palaces and Christian churches were the quarries from which
materials were taken. The great mosque at Kairouan is “a forest
of columns” of antique make, and in this it is an example of
a general practice. Original building came slowly into being,
and was rudely imitative. The Andalusian art, as it is called,
the special form in which the Moorish genius embodied itself,
was evolved in Spain, and its history is incompletely made out;
for although the Alhambra, together with other examples at Seville
and Cordova, is its most perfect product, yet the art was developed
also on the Moroccan side of the strait, and its creations at Fez,
Marrâkeck, and other points still await thorough examination and
study. The examples at Tlemcen belong to this African branch of
the art, which was patronized by the early king of Tlemcen, and
was most illustrated, perhaps, by the Beni-Mérin prince in his
reign at Mansourah; for his predecessors at Fez had been rulers
on both sides the strait, and were, therefore, in more immediate
contact with the sources of the art, which, however, had already
by reason of the emigrant Andalusians made Fez a noble Moorish
city. As compared with Fez, Tlemcen was provincial.
The Berber princes ruled over a border state continually at war,
and their city retained the rudeness of the nomad life; they
were kings of a master-warrior caste among the other elements of
the population, but with a pride in public works and a delight in
decorative luxury, a capacity for civilization and elegance, which
transformed them into accomplished princes of Andalusian culture,
like their neighbors. In realizing their ambitions they were,
however, dependent on the aid of their neighbors; they obtained both
workmen, architects, and in some cases material already wrought, from
Spain, and especially from the lord of Andalusia, Abou’l-Walîd,
who sent them the ablest artisans he could command. The legend that
the bronze plates of the door of the mosque of Sidi bou-Médyen
were miraculously floated there from abroad doubtless contains the
truth that they were brought from Spain. Some of the tiles are of
foreign manufacture. The art, whether in spirit, style, or skill,
is to be looked on as an importation, though it achieved its works
on the spot. It affords admirable examples, and they are of uncommon
purity, since each newcomer did not restore and refashion older work
in current modes of later skill or taste, but left it, as the Arabs
will, to its own decay; this art is seen, therefore, very often
just as it was in its first creation save for the ravage of time.
It was not an art of structure, though at times, as in the tower
at Mansourah, it has structural nobility, or, as elsewhere, lines
of grace; neither the architects nor the workmen were expert
builders, and they treated structural elements—the column,
the arch, the dome—decoratively; these were subordinated to a
decorative intention. The genius for decoration, however, found
its main channel in the treatment of surfaces, sometimes curved and
limited, but usually flat and spacious. It sprang rather from the
art of graving than of modelling, and flowered especially in the
line—arabesque. The line was employed in a series of geometric
patterns—squares, polygons, circles—symmetrically arranged,
and mingled with more or less distinctness; or in rectilineal
or curvilineal combinations that were also patterns, repeated
indefinitely; or in formalized script based on calligraphy. The
origins of this mode go far back into antiquity; but its predominant
use is the special trait of Moorish decoration. The second main
feature of the art was in its color—mosaic. It is true that the
lineal decoration of plaster and wood was painted, in red, blue,
and olive-green, but this color has disappeared; for our eyes,
so far as color is concerned, it is the mosaic that has survived;
and here, too, the mosaic sometimes borrows its interior designs
from the patterns of lineal decoration. The origin of this mosaic
is also lost in antiquity; the art in one or another of its forms
had long been widely diffused in the Mediterranean world. The Roman
soil of Africa had been covered with mosaic floors, which may still
be seen in beautiful and varied collections of them at Tunis and
Sousse; Byzantine work, such as is found at Ravenna and in Sicily,
was a living art through the Middle Ages; and the contemporary
Persian manufacture of tiles and similar work passed everywhere
in the commercial world, and may be closely connected technically
with the art in Andalusia. It was for exterior decoration that
the mosaic faience was principally employed. The motives of the
lineal decoration are few—disks, stars, and the like—and in the
floral design only the acanthus formalized is used; similarly,
the colors of the mosaic are few—manganese-brown, white,
copper-green, iron-yellow, rarely blue. The combination of these
few elements—colors and patterns—is unrestricted by any limit,
they are undefined by any form, they grow by accretion, and they
thus obtain and give the quality of the infinite, the illimitable,
which is the most obvious trait of the arabesque. It is an art that
plays with form only to escape from it, whether in color or in line.
The charm of this art does not lie merely in its perfect fitness to
its light and cheap materials, nor in its easy solving of its own
problems, but rather in its kinship to the Arab genius, its response
to the desert spirit. This is most deeply felt in the mosques, where
it is in contact with the gravest things in life. The mosque is the
plainest of sacred places, and delights a Puritan soul. There are
no images of humanized deities or deified men; there is neither god
nor saint nor mythic story; neither is there any mystery of dogma or
speculation to be told in symbolism of material things; there is only
unbodied and unformulated religious awe, the worship of the spirit in
the spirit. The art that defines has here no function. The Western
genius, master of life, is a defining genius; the oriental way is
different—it is an effusion, an expansion, an illimitable going
forth. This art, too, with its few motives, its paucity of fact,
its monotony of structure, yet issuing always on the illimitable,
the infinite, resumes the structure of the desert, which is similar
in its elements and effects, its composition and its sentiment. It is
also completely free from the burden of thought, the fatal gift of
Western genius with its hard definings, too avid of knowing, whose
art is rather a means to cage than to free the bird of life. It is
an art restorative of the senses in their own kingdom—whether in
line or color, a pure joy to the eye, a “disembodied joy,” too,
as art should be, full of abstraction, yet unconscious of anything
beyond the sensuous sphere. It is easy to sum its salient technical
points and to indicate its obvious affinities with the mosque, with
desert nature, with the Arab genius; but even though he see it, one
cannot easily appreciate it in its decay, nor well imagine it in
its fresh beauty, as a visible harmony for the soul, without some
initiation into the fundamental moods of the race for whom and of
whom it was. To me, nevertheless, the sight was a pure delight,
as is the memory; a nomad art it seemed, born of the desert and
expressive of it, an evanescence of beauty playing on fragile and
humble materials, as life in the desert is fragile and humble, and
clad in the evanescence of nature—life not too seriously valued,
sure of speedy ruin, not worthy of too great outward cost.