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.