Part 4
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 create upon 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 of adopting 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 who seem 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 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 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.
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[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.
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.
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.
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[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]