It may be an odd thing to suggest that a crowd in Bond Street
or Piccadilly should model itself on this masquerade of religions.
It would be facile and fascinating to turn it into a satire or
an extravaganza. Every good and innocent mind would be gratified
with the image of a bowler hat in the precise proportions of the Dome
of St. Paul's, and surmounted with a little ball and cross,
symbolising the loyalty of some Anglican to his mother church.
It might even be pleasing to see the street dominated
with a more graceful top-hat modelled on the Eiffel Tower,
and signifying the wearer's faith in scientific enterprise,
or perhaps in its frequent concomitant of political corruption.
These would be fair Western parallels to the head-dresses of Jerusalem;
modelled on Mount Ararat or Solomon's Temple, and some may insinuate
that we are not very likely ever to meet them in the Strand.
A man wearing whiskers is not even compelled to plead some sort
of excuse or authority for wearing whiskers, as the Jew can
for wearing ringlets; and though the Anglican clergyman may indeed
be very loyal to his mother church, there might be considerable
hesitation if his mother bade him bind his hair. Nevertheless a more
historical view of the London and Jerusalem crowds will show as far
from impossible to domesticate such symbols; that some day a lady's
jewels might mean something like the sacred jewels of the Patriarch,
or a lady's furs mean something like the furred turban of the Rabbi.
History indeed will show us that we are not so much superior to them
as inferior to ourselves.
When the Crusaders came to Palestine, and came riding up that road
from Jaffa where the orange plantations glow on either side, they came
with motives which may have been mixed and are certainly disputed.
There may have been different theories among the Crusaders; there are
certainly different theories among the critics of the Crusaders.
Many sought God, some gold, some perhaps black magic. But whatever else
they were in search of, they were not in search of the picturesque.
They were not drawn from a drab civilisation by that mere thirst for
colour that draws so many modern artists to the bazaars of the East.
In those days there were colours in the West as well as in the East;
and a glow in the sunset as well as in the sunrise. Many of the men
who rode up that road were dressed to match the most glorious
orange garden and to rival the most magnificent oriental king.
King Richard cannot have been considered dowdy, even by comparison,
when he rode on that high red saddle graven with golden lions,
with his great scarlet hat and his vest of silver crescents.
That squire of the comparatively unobtrusive household
of Joinville, who was clad in scarlet striped with yellow,
must surely have been capable (if I may be allowed the expression)
of knocking them in the most magnificent Asiatic bazaar.
Nor were these external symbols less significant, but rather more
significant than the corresponding symbols of the Eastern civilisation.
It is true that heraldry began beautifully as an art and afterwards
degenerated into a science. But even in being a science it had
to possess a significance; and the Western colours were often
allegorical where the Eastern were only accidental. To a certain
extent this more philosophical ornament was doubtless imitated;
and I have remarked elsewhere on the highly heraldic lions
which even the Saracens carved over the gate of St. Stephen.
But it is the extraordinary and even exasperating fact that it was not
imitated as the most meaningless sort of modern vulgarity is imitated.
King Richard's great red hat embroidered with beasts and birds has not
overshadowed the earth so much as the billycock, which no one has yet
thought of embroidering with any such natural and universal imagery.
The cockney tourist is not only more likely to set out with
the intention of knocking them, but he has actually knocked them;
and Orientals are imitating the tweeds of the tourist more than they
imitated the stripes of the squire. It is a curious and perhaps
melancholy truth that the world is imitating our worst, our weariness
and our dingy decline, when it did not imitate our best and the high
moment of our morning.
Perhaps it is only when civilisation becomes a disease that it
becomes an infection. Possibly it is only when it becomes a very
virulent disease that it becomes an epidemic. Possibly again
that is the meaning both of cosmopolitanism and imperialism.
Anyhow the tribes sitting by Afric's sunny fountains did
not take up the song when Francis of Assisi stood on the very
mountain of the Middle Ages, singing the Canticle of the Sun.
When Michael Angelo carved a statue in snow, Eskimos did not
copy him, despite their large natural quarries or resources.
Laplanders never made a model of the Elgin Marbles, with a frieze
of reindeers instead of horses; nor did Hottentots try to paint
Mumbo Jumbo as Raphael had painted Madonnas. But many a savage king
has worn a top-hat, and the barbarian has sometimes been so debased
as to add to it a pair of trousers. Explosive bullets and the brutal
factory system numbers of advanced natives are anxious to possess.
And it was this reflection, arising out of the mere pleasure
of the eye in the parti-coloured crowd before me, that brought back
my mind to the chief problem and peril of our position in Palestine,
on which I touched earlier in this chapter; the peril which is largely
at the back both of the just and of the unjust objections to Zionism.
It is the fear that the West, in its modern mercantile mood,
will send not its best but its worst. The artisan way of putting it,
from the point of view of the Arab, is that it will mean not
so much the English merchant as the Jewish money-lender. I shall
write elsewhere of better types of Jew and the truths they
really represent; but the Jewish money-lender is in a curious
and complex sense the representative of this unfortunate paradox.
He is not only unpopular both in the East and West, but he is unpopular
in the West for being Eastern and in the East for being Western.
He is accused in Europe of Asiatic crookedness and secrecy,
and in Asia of European vulgarity and bounce. I have said _a propos_
of the Arab that the dignity of the oriental is in his long robe;
the merely mercantile Jew is the oriental who has lost his long robe,
which leads to a dangerous liveliness in the legs. He bustles
and hustles too much; and in Palestine some of the unpopularity
even of the better sort of Jew is simply due to his restlessness.
But there remains a fear that it will not be a question of the
better sort of Jew, or of the better sort of British influence.
The same ignominious inversion which reproduces everywhere the factory
chimney without the church tower, which spreads a cockney commerce
but not a Christian culture, has given many men a vague feeling
that the influence of modern civilisation will surround these ragged
but coloured groups with something as dreary and discoloured,
as unnatural and as desolate as the unfamiliar snow in which they
were shivering as I watched them. There seemed a sort of sinister
omen in this strange visitation that the north had sent them;
in the fact that when the north wind blew at last, it had only
scattered on them this silver dust of death.
It may be that this more melancholy mood was intensified by that
pale landscape and those impassable ways. I do not dislike snow;
on the contrary I delight in it; and if it had drifted as deep in my
own country against my own door I should have thought it the triumph
of Christmas, and a thing as comic as my own dog and donkey.
But the people in the coloured rags did dislike it; and the effects of it
were not comic but tragic. The news that came in seemed in that little
lonely town like the news of a great war, or even of a great defeat.
Men fell to regarding it, as they have fallen too much to regarding
the war, merely as an unmixed misery, and here the misery was
really unmixed. As the snow began to melt corpses were found in it,
homes were hopelessly buried, and even the gradual clearing of the roads
only brought him stories of the lonely hamlets lost in the hills.
It seemed as if a breath of the aimless destruction that wanders
in the world had drifted across us; and no task remained for men
but the weary rebuilding of ruins and the numbering of the dead.
Only as I went out of the Jaffa Gate, a man told me that the tree
of the hundred deaths, that was the type of the eternal Caliphate
of the Crescent, was cast down and lying broken in the snow.
CHAPTER VI
THE GROUPS OF THE CITY
Palestine is a striped country; that is the first effect of landscape
on the eye. It runs in great parallel lines wavering into vast hills
and valleys, but preserving the parallel pattern; as if drawn boldly
but accurately with gigantic chalks of green and grey and red and yellow.
The natural explanation or (to speak less foolishly) the natural process
of this is simple enough. The stripes are the strata of the rock,
only they are stripped by the great rains, so that everything has
to grow on ledges, repeating yet again that terraced character
to be seen in the vineyards and the staircase streets of the town.
But though the cause is in a sense in the ruinous strength of the rain,
the hues are not the dreary hues of ruin. What earth there is is commonly
a red clay richer than that of Devon; a red clay of which it would
be easy to believe that the giant limbs of the first man were made.
What grass there is is not only an enamel of emerald, but is
literally crowded with those crimson anemones which might well have
called forth the great saying touching Solomon in all his glory.
And even what rock there is is coloured with a thousand secondary
and tertiary tints, as are the walls and streets of the Holy City
which is built from the quarries of these hills. For the old
stones of the old Jerusalem are as precious as the precious stones
of the New Jerusalem; and at certain moments of morning or of sunset,
every pebble might be a pearl.
And all these coloured strata rise so high and roll so far that they might
be skies rather than slopes. It is as if we looked up at a frozen sunset;
or a daybreak fixed for ever with its fleeting bars of cloud.
And indeed the fancy is not without a symbolic suggestiveness.
This is the land of eternal things; but we tend too much to forget
that recurrent things are eternal things. We tend to forget that
subtle tones and delicate hues, whether in the hills or the heavens,
were to the primitive poets and sages as visible as they are to us;
and the strong and simple words in which they describe them
do not prove that they did not realise them. When Wordsworth
speaks of "the clouds that gather round the setting sun,"
we assume that he has seen every shadow of colour and every
curve of form; but when the Hebrew poet says "He hath made
the clouds his chariot"; we do not always realise that he was
full of indescribable emotions aroused by indescribable sights.
We vaguely assume that the very sky was plainer in primitive times.
We feel as if there had been a fashion in sunsets; or as if dawn
was always grey in the Stone Age or brown in the Bronze Age.
But there is another parable written in those long lines of many-coloured
clay and stone. Palestine is in every sense a stratified country.
It is not only true in the natural sense, as here where the clay has
fallen away and left visible the very ribs of the hills. It is true
in the quarries where men dig, in the dead cities where they excavate,
and even in the living cities where they still fight and pray.
The sorrow of all Palestine is that its divisions in culture,
politics and theology are like its divisions in geology.
The dividing line is horizontal instead of vertical. The frontier
does not run between states but between stratified layers.
The Jew did not appear beside the Canaanite but on top of the Canaanite;
the Greek not beside the Jew but on top of the Jew; the Moslem not
beside the Christian but on top of the Christian. It is not merely
a house divided against itself, but one divided across itself.
It is a house in which the first floor is fighting the second floor,
in which the basement is oppressed from above and attics are besieged
from below. There is a great deal of gunpowder in the cellars;
and people are by no means comfortable even on the roof.
In days of what some call Bolshevism, it may be said that most states
are houses in which the kitchen has declared war on the drawing-room.
But this will give no notion of the toppling pagoda of political
and religious and racial differences, of which the name is Palestine.
To explain that it is necessary to give the traveller's first
impressions more particularly in their order, and before I
return to this view of the society as stratified, I must state
the problem more practically as it presents itself while the society
still seems fragmentary.
We are always told that the Turk kept the peace between
the Christian sects. It would be nearer the nerve of vital
truth to say that he made the war between the Christian sects.
But it would be nearer still to say that the war is something
not made by Turks but made up by infidels. The tourist visiting
the churches is often incredulous about the tall tales told about them;
but he is completely credulous about the tallest of all the tales,
the tale that is told against them. He believes in a frantic fraticidal
war perpetually waged by Christian against Christian in Jerusalem.
It freshens the free sense of adventure to wander through those
crooked and cavernous streets, expecting every minute to see the
Armenian Patriarch trying to stick a knife into the Greek Patriarch;
just as it would add to the romance of London to linger about Lambeth
and Westminster in the hope of seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury locked
in a deadly grapple with the President of the Wesleyan Conference.
And if we return to our homes at evening without having actually seen
these things with the eye of flesh, the vision has none the less shone
on our path, and led us round many corners with alertness and with hope.
But in bald fact religion does not involve perpetual war in the East,
any more than patriotism involves perpetual war in the West.
What it does involve in both cases is a defensive attitude;
a vigilance on the frontiers. There is no war; but there is
an armed peace.
I have already explained the sense in which I say that the Moslems
are unhistoric or even anti-historic. Perhaps it would be near
the truth to say that they are prehistoric. They attach themselves
to the tremendous truisms which men might have realised before they
had any political experience at all; which might have been scratched
with primitive knives of flint upon primitive pots of clay.
Being simple and sincere, they do not escape the need for legends;
I might almost say that, being honest, they do not escape the need
for lies. But their mood is not historic, they do not wish to grapple
with the past; they do not love its complexities; nor do they
understand the enthusiasm for its details and even its doubts.
Now in all this the Moslems of a place like Jerusalem are the very
opposite of the Christians of Jerusalem. The Christianity of Jerusalem is
highly historic, and cannot be understood without historical imagination.
And this is not the strong point perhaps of those among us who generally
record their impressions of the place. As the educated Englishman
does not know the history of England, it would be unreasonable
to expect him to know the history of Moab or of Mesopotamia.
He receives the impression, in visiting the shrines of Jerusalem,
of a number of small sects squabbling about small things.
In short, he has before him a tangle of trivialities, which include
the Roman Empire in the West and in the East, the Catholic Church
in its two great divisions, the Jewish race, the memories of Greece
and Egypt, and the whole Mahometan world in Asia and Africa.
It may be that he regards these as small things; but I should be glad
if he would cast his eye over human history, and tell me what are
the large things. The truth is that the things that meet to-day in
Jerusalem are by far the greatest things that the world has yet seen.
If they are not important nothing on this earth is important,
and certainly not the impressions of those who happen to be bored
by them. But to understand them it is necessary to have something
which is much commoner in Jerusalem than in Oxford or Boston;
that sort of living history which we call tradition.
For instance, the critic generally begins by dismissing these conflicts
with the statement that they are all about small points of theology.
I do not admit that theological points are small points. Theology is only
thought applied to religion; and those who prefer a thoughtless religion
need not be so very disdainful of others with a more rationalistic taste.
The old joke that the Greek sects only differed about a single
letter is about the lamest and most illogical joke in the world.
An atheist and a theist only differ by a single letter; yet theologians
are so subtle as to distinguish definitely between the two.
But though I do not in any case allow that it is idle to be concerned
about theology, as a matter of actual fact these quarrels are not
chiefly concerned about theology. They are concerned about history.
They are concerned with the things about which the only human sort
of history is concerned; great memories of great men, great battles
for great ideas, the love of brave people for beautiful places,
and the faith by which the dead are alive. It is quite true that with
this historic sense men inherit heavy responsibilities and revenges,
fury and sorrow and shame. It is also true that without it men die,
and nobody even digs their graves.
The truth is that these quarrels are rather about patriotism than
about religion, in the sense of theology. That is, they are just such
heroic passions about the past as we call in the West by the name
of nationalism; but they are conditioned by the extraordinarily
complicated position of the nations, or what corresponds to the nations.
We of the West, if we wish to understand it, must imagine ourselves
as left with all our local loves and family memories unchanged,
but the places affected by them intermingled and tumbled about by some
almost inconceivable convulsion. We must imagine cities and landscapes
to have turned on some unseen pivots, or been shifted about by some
unseen machinery, so that our nearest was furthest and our remotest
enemy our neighbour. We must imagine monuments on the wrong sites,
and the antiquities of one county emptied out on top of another.
And we must imagine through all this the thin but tough threads
of tradition everywhere tangled and yet everywhere unbroken.
We must picture a new map made out of the broken fragments of the old map;
and yet with every one remembering the old map and ignoring the new.
In short we must try to imagine, or rather we must try to hope,
that our own memories would be as long and our own loyalties
as steady as the memories and loyalties of the little crowd
in Jerusalem; and hope, or pray, that we could only be as rigid,
as rabid and as bigoted as are these benighted people.
Then perhaps we might preserve all our distinctions of truth
and falsehood in a chaos of time and space.
We have to conceive that the Tomb of Napoleon is in the middle
of Stratford-on-Avon, and that the Nelson Column is erected
on the field of Bannockburn; that Westminster Abbey has taken
wings and flown away to the most romantic situation on the Rhine,
and that the wooden "Victory" is stranded, like the Ark on Ararat,
on the top of the Hill of Tara; that the pilgrims to the shrine
of Lourdes have to look for it in the Island of Runnymede,
and that the only existing German statue of Bismarck is to be found
in the Pantheon at Paris. This intolerable topsy-turvydom is no
exaggeration of the way in which stories cut across each other and sites
are imposed on each other in the historic chaos of the Holy City.
Now we in the West are very lucky in having our nations normally
distributed into their native lands; so that good patriots can talk
about themselves without perpetually annoying their neighbours.
Some of the pacifists tell us that national frontiers and divisions
are evil because they exasperate us to war. It would be far truer
to say that national frontiers and divisions keep us at peace.
It would be far truer to say that we can always love each
other so long as we do not see each other. But the people
of Jerusalem are doomed to have difference without division.
They are driven to set pillar against pillar in the same temple,
while we can set city against city across the plains of the world.
While for us a church rises from its foundations as naturally
as a flower springs from a flower-bed, they have to bless the soil
and curse the stones that stand on it. While the land we love
is solid under our feet to the earth's centre, they have to see
all they love and hate lying in strata like alternate night and day,
as incompatible and as inseparable. Their entanglements are tragic,
but they are not trumpery or accidental. Everything has a meaning;
they are loyal to great names as men are loyal to great nations;
they have differences about which they feel bound to dispute to the death;
but in their death they are not divided.
Jerusalem is a small town of big things; and the average modern
city is a big town full of small things. All the most important
and interesting powers in history are here gathered within the area
of a quiet village; and if they are not always friends, at least they
are necessarily neighbours. This is a point of intellectual interest,
and even intensity, that is far too little realised. It is a matter
of modern complaint that in a place like Jerusalem the Christian
groups do not always regard each other with Christian feelings.
It is said that they fight each other; but at least they meet each other.
In a great industrial city like London or Liverpool, how often do they
even meet each other? In a large town men live in small cliques,
which are much narrower than classes; but in this small town they
live at least by large contacts, even if they are conflicts.
Nor is it really true, in the daily humours of human life, that they
are only conflicts. I have heard an eminent English clergyman from
Cambridge bargaining for a brass lamp with a Syrian of the Greek Church,
and asking the advice of a Franciscan friar who was standing smiling
in the same shop. I have met the same representative of the Church
of England, at a luncheon party with the wildest Zionist Jews,
and with the Grand Mufti, the head of the Moslem religion.
Suppose the same Englishman had been, as he might well have been,
an eloquent and popular vicar in Chelsea or Hampstead. How often
would he have met a Franciscan or a Zionist? Not once in a year.
How often would he have met a Moslem or a Greek Syrian? Not once
in a lifetime. Even if he were a bigot, he would be bound
in Jerusalem to become a more interesting kind of bigot.
Even if his opinions were narrow, his experiences would be wide.
He is not, as a fact, a bigot, nor, as a fact, are the other
people bigots, but at the worst they could not be unconscious bigots.
They could not live in such uncorrected complacency as is possible
to a larger social set in a larger social system. They could not
be quite so ignorant as a broad-minded person in a big suburb.
Indeed there is something fine and distinguished about the very delicacy,
and even irony, of their diplomatic relations. There is something
of chivalry in the courtesy of their armed truce, and it is a great
school of manners that includes such differences in morals.
This is an aspect of the interest of Jerusalem which can easily
be neglected and is not easy to describe. The normal life
there is intensely exciting, not because the factions fight,
but rather because they do not fight. Of the abnormal crisis
when they did fight, and the abnormal motives that made them fight,
I shall have something to say later on. But it was true for a great
part of the time that what was picturesque and thrilling was not
the war but the peace. The sensation of being in this little town
is rather like that of being at a great international congress.
It is like that moving and glittering social satire, in which