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 from the 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 simpler and 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 towards their 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 cause which 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 religion
and 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 an indolent 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.
[Illustration]
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 tribute can be
paid to the enormous invasion of the seventh century.
[Sidenote: 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 were ended—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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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 European
things. 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 innoculation perhaps 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.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
In the presence of the doom or message which the Arabians communicated
to our race in Africa, one is compelled to something of the awe with
which one would regard a tomb from which great miracles proceeded, or a
dead hero who, though dead, might not be disturbed. The thing we have to
combat, or which we refrain and dread from combating, is not tangible,
and is the more difficult to remove. It has sunk into the Atlas and into
the desert, it has filled the mind of every man from the Soudan which it
controls up northwards to Atlas and throughout this land.
[Sidenote: The Touaregs]
Roaming in the Sahara are bands of men famous for their courage and
their isolation. They are called the Touaregs. They are of the same race
and the same language as those original Berbers who yet maintain
themselves apart in the heights of Aurès or of the Djurdjura. They are
the enemies of all outside their tribes, especially of the Arab
merchants, upon whose caravans they live by pillage. Yet even these
Islam has thoroughly possessed and would seem to have conquered for
ever. Their language has escaped; their tiny literature (for they have
letters of their own, and their alphabet is indigenous) has survived
every external influence, but even there the God of the Mohammedans has
appeared.
One taken captive some years since wrote back from Europe to his tribe
in his own stiff characters a very charming letter in which he ended by
recommending himself to the young women of his home, for he himself was
a fighter, courteous, and in his thirtieth year. But when he had written
“Salute the Little Queens from me,” he was careful to add an invocation
to Allah. And if in their long forays it is necessary to bury hastily
some companion who has fallen in the retreat, his shallow grave in the
sand is carefully designed according to the custom of religion. They
leave him upon his right side in an attitude which they hold as sacred,
his face turned to the east and towards Mecca. In this posture he awaits
the Great Day.
[Sidenote: The Lack of an Opposing Faith]
Against this vast permanent and rooted influence we have nothing to
offer. Our designs of material benefit or of positive enlightenment are
to the presence of this common creed as is some human machine to the
sea. We can pass through it, but we cannot occupy it. It spreads out
before our advance, it closes up behind. Nor will our work be
accomplished until we have recovered, perhaps through disasters suffered
in our European homes, the full tradition of our philosophy and a faith
which shall permeate all our actions as completely as does this faith of
theirs.
That no religion brought by us stands active against their own is an
apparent weakness in the reconquest, but that consequence of the long
indifference through which Europe has passed is not the only impediment
it has produced. The dissolution of the principal bond between
Europeans—the bond of their traditional ritual and confession—has also
prevented the occupation of Africa from being, as it should have been, a
united and therefore an orderly campaign of the West to recover its own.
[Sidenote: Cause of Isolated French Action]
Had not our religion suffered the violent schisms which are now so
slowly healing, and had not our general life resolved itself for a time
into a blind race between the various provinces of Europe, the
reconquest of Barbary would have fallen naturally to the nations which
regard each its own section of the opposing coast; as in the reconquest
of Spain the Asturias advanced upon Leon, the Galicians upon Portugal,
and Old Castille upon the southern province to which it extended its own
name. Then Italy would have concerned itself with Tunis—with Ifrigya,
that is—and with the rare fringe of the Tripolitan and its shallow
harbours. The French would have occupied Numidia. The Spaniards would
have swept on to re-Christianise the last province of the west from Oran
to the Atlantic, and so have completed the task which they let drop
after the march upon Granada. Such should have been the natural end of
mediæval progress, and that reconstruction of the Empire (which was the
nebulous but constant goal towards which the Middle Ages moved) would
have been accomplished. But the most sudden and the most inexplicable of
our revolutions came in and broke the scheme. The Middle Ages died
without a warning. A curious passion for metaphysics seized upon certain
districts of the north, which in their exaltation attempted to live
alone: the south, in resisting the disruption of Europe, exhausted its
energies; and meanwhile the temptation to exploit the Americas and the
Indies drained the Mediterranean of adventurers and of navies. Islam in
its lethargy acquired new vigour from its latest converts, and the
Turks, with none but the Venetians to oppose them, tore away from us the
whole of the Levant and rode up the Danube to insult the centre of the
continent. The European system flew apart, and its various units moved
along separate paths with various careers of hesitation or of fever. It
was not until the Revolution and the reconstitution of sane government
among us that the common scheme of the west could reappear.
On this account—on account of the vast disturbance which accompanied the
Reformation and the Renaissance—Europe halted for three centuries. When
at last a force landed upon the southern shore of the Mediterranean, it
was a force which happened to be despatched by the French.
[Sidenote: The French]
The vices and the energy of this people are well known. They are
perpetually critical of their own authorities, and perpetually lamenting
the decline of their honour. There is no difficulty they will not
surmount. They have crossed all deserts and have perfected every art.
Their victories in the field would seem legendary were they not
attested; their audacity, whether in civil war or in foreign adventure,
has permanently astonished their neighbours to the south, the east and
the north. They are the most general in framing a policy and the most
actual in pursuing it. Their incredible achievements have always the
appearance of accidents. They are tenacious of the memory of defeats
rather than of victories. They change more rapidly and with less
reverence than any other men the external expression of their tireless
effort, yet, more than any other men, they preserve—in spite of
themselves—an original and unchanging spirit. Their boundaries are
continually the same. They are acute and vivid in matters of reason,
careless in those of judgment. A coward and a statesman are equally rare
among them, yet their achievements are the result of prudence and their
history is marked by a succession of silent and calculating politicians.
Alone of European peoples the Gauls have, by a sort of habit, indulged
in huge raids which seemed but an expense of military passion to no
purpose. They alone could have poured out in that tide of the third
century before our era to swamp Lombardy, to wreck Delphi, and to
colonise Asia. They alone could have conceived the crusades: they alone
the revolutionary wars. It is remarkable that in all such eruptions they
alone fought eastward, marching from camp into the early light; they
alone were content to return with little spoil and with no addition of
provinces, to write some epic of their wars.
It is evident that such a people would produce in Africa, not a European
and a general, but a Gallic and a particular effect. They boast
themselves in everything the continuators of the Romans. They do,
indeed, inherit the Roman passion for equality, and they, like the
Romans, have tenaciously fought their way to equality by an effort
spread over many hundred years. They are Roman in their careful
building, in their strict roads, in their small stature, in their heavy
chests, in their clarity of language, in their adoration of office and
of symbol, in their lightning marches: the heavy lading of their troops,
their special pedantry, their disgust at vagueness, their ambition and
their honour are Roman. But they are not Roman in permanent stability of
detail. The Romans spread an odour of religion round the smallest
functions of the State: of the French you can say no more than that any
French thing you see to-day may be gone to-morrow, and that only France
remains. They are not Roman in the determination never to retreat, nor
are they Roman in the worship of silence. The French can express the
majesty of the Empire in art: they cannot act it in their daily life—for
this inheritance of Rome the Spaniards are better suited. As for the
Roman conception of a fatal expansion the Russians exceed them, and for
the Roman ease and aptitude the Italians.
Had, then, the reconquest of Barbary fallen naturally to the three
sisters—to Spain, to Italy, and to France, the long attempt of Europe
might have reached its end. The Spaniard would have crushed and
dominated in Morocco where the Mohammedan was most strongly entrenched;
the Italian, with his subtle admixture, would have kneaded Tunis and the
eastern march into a firm barrier; the French would have developed their
active commerce upon the many small towns of the Central Tell, would
have pierced, as they are fitted to pierce, the high Central Plateaux
with admirable roads, and would have garrisoned, as their taste for a
risk well fits them to garrison, the outposts of the Central Atlas
against the desert. Then the task would be over, and Europe would be
resettled within its original boundaries.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The March]
On their long route marches, on the marches of their manœuvres and their
wars, the French, along their roads which are direct and august, (and at
evening, when one is weary, sombre,) seek a place of reunion and of
repose: upon this the corps converges, and there at last a man may lie a
long night under shelter and content to sleep: a town lies before the
pioneers and is their goal. It stands, tiny with spires, above the
horizon of their hedgeless plains, and as they go they sing of the halt,
or, for long spaces, are silent, bent trudging under the pack: for they
abhor parade. Very often they do not reach their goal. They then lie out
in bivouac under the sky and light very many fires, five to a company or
more, and sleep out unsatisfied. Such a strain and such an attempt: such
a march, such a disappointment, and such a goal are the symbols of their
history; for they are perpetually seeking, under arms, a Europe that
shall endure. In this search they must continue here in Africa, as they
continue in their own country, that march of theirs which sees the city
ever before it and yet cannot come near to salute the guard at the gates
and to enter in. It is their business to re-create the Empire in this
province of Africa. It may be that here also they will come to no
completion; but if they fail, Europe will fail with them, and it will be
a sign that our tradition has ended.
[Sidenote: The French Genius]
They have done the Latin thing. First they have designed, then
organised, then built, then ploughed, and their wealth has come last.
The mind is present to excess in the stamp they have laid upon Africa.
Their utter regularity and the sense of will envelop the whole province;
and their genius, inflexible and yet alert, alert and yet monotonous, is
to be seen everywhere in similar roads, similar bridges of careful and
even ornamented stone, similar barracks and loop-holed walls.
[Sidenote: The Straight Railway]
There is a perspective upon the High Plateaux which though it is
exceptional is typical of their spirit. It is on the salt plain just
before the gate of the desert is reached and the fall on to the desert
begun. Here the flat and unfruitful level glares white and red: it is of
little use to men or none. Some few adventurers, like their peers in the
Rockies, have attempted to enclose a patch or two of ground, but the
whole landscape is parched and dead. Through this, right on like a
gesture of command, like the dart of a spear, goes the rail, urging
towards the Sahara, as though the Sahara were not a boundary but a goal.
The odd, single hills, as high as the Wrekin or higher, upon which not
even the goats can live, look down upon the straight line thus traced:
these hills and the track beneath them afford a stupendous contrast.
Nowhere is the determination of man more defiant against the sullen
refusal of the earth.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The French Afforestation]
There is another effort of the French which may be watched with more
anxiety and more comprehension by northern men than their admirable
roads or their railways or their wires above the sand, and that is their
afforestation.
It is a debate which will not be decided (for the material of full
decision is lacking) whether, since the Romans crowded their millions
into this Africa, the rainfall has or has not changed. It is certain
that they husbanded water upon every side and built great barricades to
hold the streams; yet it is certain, also, that their cities stood where
no such great groups of men could live to-day. There are those who
believe that under Atlas, towards the desert, a shallow sea spread
westward from the Mediterranean and from Syrtis: there are others who
believe that the dry water-courses of the Sahara were recently alive
with streams, and that the tombs and inscriptions of the waste places,
now half buried in the sand, prove a great lake upon whose shores a
whole province could cultivate and live. Both hypotheses are doubtful
for this reason—that no good legend preserves the record. Changes far
less momentous have left whole cycles of ballads and stories behind
them. The Sahara has been the Sahara since men have sung or spoken of
it. Moreover, the Romans did certainly push out, as the French have
done, towards certain limits, beyond which no effort was worth the while
of armies. They felt a boundary to the south. They could bear the summer
of Biskra, but not that of Touggourt: their posts upon the edge of the
desert were ultimate posts as are the European garrisons to-day.