 Chapter 3 The Gates of the City The man I met coming from Jerusalem reported all sorts of contradictory impressions, and yet my own impression contradicted them all. Their impressions were doubtless as true as mine, but I describe my own because it is true, and because I think it points to a neglected truth about the real Jerusalem. I need not say I did not expect the real Jerusalem to be the new Jerusalem, a city of charity and peace, any more than a city of chrysalite and pearl. I might more reasonably have expected an austere and aesthetic place, oppressed with the weight of its destiny, with no ends except monasteries, and these sealed with the terrible silence of the trappists, an awful city where men speak by signs in the street. I did not need the numberless jokes about Jerusalem today to warn me against expecting this. Anyhow, I did not expect it, and certainly I did not find it. But neither did I find what I was much more inclined to expect, something at the other extreme. Many reports had led me to look for a truly cosmopolitan town. It is a truly conquered town. I looked for a place like Cairo containing indeed old and interesting things, but open on every side the new and vulgar things, full of the touts who seem only created for tourists and the tourists who only seem created for touts. There may be more of this in the place than pleases those who would idealize it, but I fancy there is much less of it than is commonly supposed in the reaction from such an ideal. It does not, like Cairo, offer the exciting experience of twenty guides fighting for one traveler, of young Turks drinking American cocktails as a protest against Christian wine. The town is quite inconvenient enough to make it a decent place for pilgrims, or a stranger might have imagined a place even less western than Cairo, one of the villages of Palestine described in dusty old books of biblical research. He might remember drawings like diagrams representing a well or a wine press, rather a dry well, so to speak, and a wine press very difficult to associate with wine. These hard, colorless outlines never did justice to the color of the yeast, but even to give it the color of the yeast would not do justice to Jerusalem. If I had anticipated the baggedad of all our dreams, a maze of bazaars glowing with gorgeous wares, I should have been wrong again. There is quite enough of this vivid and varied color in Jerusalem, but it is not the first fact that arrests the attention, and certainly not the first that arrested mine. I give my own first impression, as a fact, for what it's worth and exactly as it came. I did not expect it, and it was some time before I even understood it. As soon as I was walking inside the walls of Jerusalem, I had an overwhelming impression that I was walking in the town of Rye, where it looks across the flat sea meadows toward Windchelsea. As I tried to explain this eccentric sentiment to myself, I was conscious of another which at once completed and contradicted it. I was not only like a memory of Rye, it was mixed with a memory of the Mount St. Michael, which stands among the sands of Normandy on the other side of the narrow sea. The first part of this sensation is that the traveler, as he walks the stony streets between the walls, feels that he is inside a fortress. But it is the paradox of such place that while he feels, in a sense, that he is in a prison, he also feels that he is on a precipice. The sense of being uplifted and set on a high place comes to him through the smallest cranny or most accidental crack in rock or stone. It comes to him especially through those long, narrow windows in the walls of the old fortifications, those slits in the stone through which the medieval archers used their bows and the medieval artists used their eyes with even greater success. Those green glimpses of fields far below, or flats far away, which delight us and yet make us dizzy by being both near and far when seen through the windows of Memeling, can often be seen from the walls of Jerusalem. And I remember that in the same strips of medieval landscape could be seen always here and there, a steep hill crowned with a city of towers, and I knew I had the mystical and double pleasure of seeing such a hill and standing on it. A city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid, but it is more strange when the hill cannot anywhere be hid, even from the citizen in the city. Then indeed I knew that what I saw was Jerusalem of the Crusaders, or at least Jerusalem of the Crusades. It was a medieval town with walls and gates and citadel and built upon a hill to be defended by bowmen. The greater part of the actual walls now standing were built by Muslims late in the Middle Ages, but they are almost exactly like the walls that were being built by the Christians at or before that time. The Crusader Edward afterwards, Edward I, reared such battlements far away among the rainy hills of Wales. I do not know what elements were originally Gothic or what originally Saracenic. The Crusaders and the Saracens constantly copied each other while they combated each other. Indeed it is a fact always to be found in such combats. It is one of the arguments against war that are really human, and therefore are never used by humanitarians. The curse of war is that it does lead to more international imitation, while in peace and freedom men can afford to have national variety. But some things in this country were certainly copied from the Christian invaders, and even if they are not Christian they are in many ways strangely European. The walls and gates which now stand, whatever stood before them and whatever comes after them, carry a memory of those men from the West who came here upon that wild adventure, who climbed this rock and clung to it so perilously, from the victory of Godfrey to the victory of Saladin. And that is why this momentary eastern exile reminded me so strangely of the hill of Rye and of Home. I do not forget, of course, that all these visible walls and towers are but the battlements and pinnacles of a buried city, or of many buried cities. I do not forget that such buildings have foundations that are to us almost like fossils, the gigantic fossils of some other geological epic. Something may be said later of those lost empires whose very masterpieces are to us like petrified monsters. From this height, after long histories unrecorded, fell the forgotten idol of the Jebusites. On that day when David's javelin men scaled the city and carried through it, in darkness, behind his colored curtains, the God whose image had never been made by man. Here was wage that endless war between the graven gods of the plain and the invisible god of the mountain. From here the hosts carrying the sacred fish of the Philistines were driven back to the sea from which their worship came. Those who worshiped on this hill had come out of bondage in Egypt and went into bondage in Babylon. Small as was their country, there passed before them almost the whole pageant of the whole pagan world. All its strange shapes and strong, almost cruel colors remain in the records of their prophets whose lightest phrase seems heavier than the pyramids of Egypt, and whose very words are like winged bulls walking. All this historic or prehistoric interest may be touched on in its turn, but I am not dealing here with the historic secrets unearthed by the study of the place, but with the historic associations aroused by the sight of it. The traveler is in the position of that famous fantastic who tied his horse to a wayside cross in the snow, and afterward saw it dangling from the church spire of what had been a buried city. But here the cross does not stand, as it does on the top of a spire, but as it does on the top of an Egyptian obelisk in Rome, where the priests have put a cross on the top of the heathen monument, for fear it should walk. I entirely sympathize with their sentiment, and I shall try to suggest later why I think that symbol, the logical culmination of heathen as well as Christian things. The traveler in the traveler's tale looked up at last and saw from the streets far below the spire and cross dominating a Gothic city. If I looked up in a vision and saw it dominating a Babylonian city that blocked the heavens with monstrous palaces and temples, I should still think it natural that it should dominate. But the point here is that what I saw above the ground was rather the Gothic town than the Babylonian, and that it reminded me, if not specially of the cross, at least of the soldiers who took the cross. Nor do I forget the long centuries that have passed over the places since these medieval walls were built, any more than the far more interesting centuries that passed before they were built. But any one taking exception to the description on the ground may well realize, on consideration, that it is an exception that proves the rule. There is something very negative about Turkish rule, and the best and worst of it is, in the word, neglect. Everything that lived under the vague empire of Constantinople remained in a state of suspended animation, like something frozen rather than decayed, like something sleeping rather than dead. It was a sort of Arabian spell like that which turned princes and princesses into marble statues in the Arabian nights. All that part of the history of the place is a kind of sleep, and that of a sleeper who hardly knows if he has slept an hour or a hundred years. When I first found myself in the Jaffa gate of Jerusalem, my eye happened to fall on something that might be seen anywhere but which seemed somehow to have a curious significance there. Most people are conscious of some common object which still strikes them as uncommon, as if it were the first fantastic sketch in the sketchbook of nature. I myself can never overcome the sense of something almost unearthly about grass growing upon human buildings. There is in it a wild even horrible fancy as if houses could grow hair. When I saw that green hair on the huge stone blocks of the citadel, though I had seen the same thing on any number of ruins, it came to me like an omen or a vision, a curious vision at once of chaos and of sleep. It said that the grass will not grow where the turk sets his foot, but it is the other side of the same truth to say that it would grow anywhere but where it ought to grow. And though in this case it was but an accident and a symbol, it was a very true symbol. We talk of the green banner of the turk having been planted on this or that citadel, and certainly it was so planted with splendid valor and sensational victory. But this is the green banner that he plants on all his high cities in the end. Therefore my immediate impression of the walls and gates was not contradicted by my consciousness of what came before and what came after that medieval period. It remained primarily a thing of walls and gates, a thing which the modern world does not perhaps understand so well as the medieval world. There is involved in it all that idea of definition which those who do not like it are fond of describing as dogma. A wall is like a rule, and the gates are like the exceptions that prove the rule. The man making it has to decide where his rule will run and where his exceptions shall stand. He cannot have a city that is all gates and a more than a house that is all windows, nor is it possible to have a law that consists entirely of liberties. The ancient races and religions that contended for this city agreed with each other in this. When they differed about everything else, it was true, or practically all of them, that when they built the city they built the citadel. That is, whatever strange thing they may have made, they regarded it as something to be defined and defended. From this standpoint the holy city was a happy city. It had no suburbs. That is, to say, there are all sorts of buildings outside the wall, but they are outside the wall. Everybody is conscious of being inside or outside a boundary, but it is the whole character of the true suburbs which grow round our great industrial towns, that they grow as it were unconsciously and blindly, like grass that covers up a boundary line traced on the earth. This indefinite expansion is controlled neither by the soul of the city from within, nor by the resistance of the lands round about. It destroys, at once, the dignity of a town and the freedom of a countryside. The citizens are too new and numerous for citizenship yet. They never learn what there is to be learned of the ancient traditions of agriculture. The first sight of the sharp outline of Jerusalem is like a memory of the older type of limitation and liberty. Happy is the city that has a wall and happy or still if it is a precipice. Again, Jerusalem might be called a city of staircases. Many streets are steep and most actually cut into steps. It is, I believe, an element in the controversy about the cave at Bethlehem, traditionally connected with the nativity, that the sceptic doubt whether any beast of burden could have entered a stable that has to be reached by such steps. And indeed, to anyone in a modern city like London or Liverpool, it may well appear odd like a cab horse climbing a ladder. But as a matter of fact, if the asses and goats of Jerusalem could not go up and downstairs, they could not go anywhere. However this may be, I mention the matter here merely as adding another touch to that angular profile, which is the impression involved here. Strangely enough, there is something that leads up to this impression even in the labyrinth of mountain through which the road winds its way to the city. The hills round Jerusalem are themselves often hewn out in terraces, like a huge stairway. This is mostly for the practical and indeed profitable purpose of vineyards, and serves for a reminder that this ancient seat of civilization has not lost the tradition of the mercy and the glory of the vine. But in outline such a mountain looks much like the mountain of purgatory that Dante saw in his vision, lifted in terraces like titanic steps up to God. And indeed this shape also is symbolic, as symbolic as the pointed profile of the holy city. For a creed is like a ladder, while an evolution is only like a slope. A spiritual and social evolution is generally a pretty slippery slope, a miry slope, where it is very easy to slide down again. Such is something like the sharp and even abrupt impression produced by this mountain city, and especially by its wall with gates like a house with windows. A gate like a window is primarily a picture frame. The pictures that are found within the frame are indeed very various and sometimes very alien. Within this framework are indeed to be found things entirely Asiatic or entirely Muslim, or even entirely nomadic. But Jerusalem itself is not nomadic. Nothing could be less like a mere camp of tents pitched by Arabs. Nothing could be less like the mere chaos of color in a temporary and tawdry bazaar. The Arabs are there, and the colors are there, and they make a glorious picture. But the picture is in a Gothic frame, and is seen so to speak through a Gothic window. And the meaning of all this is the meaning of all windows, and especially of Gothic windows. It is that even light itself is most divine within limits, and that even the shining one is most shining when he takes upon himself a shape. Such a system of walls and gates like many other things, thought rude and primitive, is really very rationalistic. It turns the town as it were into a plan of itself, and even into a guide of itself. This is especially true, as may be suggested in a moment regarding the direction of the roads leading out of it. But anyhow a man must decide which way he will leave the city. He cannot merely drift out of the city as he drifts out of the modern cities through a litter of slums. And there is no better way to get a preliminary plan of the city than to follow the wall and fix the gates in the memory. Suppose, for instance, that a man begins in the south with the Zion Gate, which bears the ancient name of Jerusalem. This, to begin with, will sharpen the medieval and even the Western impression first, because it is here that he has the strongest sentiment of threading the narrow passages of a great castle. But also because the very name of the gate was given to this southwestern hill by Godfrey and Tancred during the period of the Latin Kingdom. I believe it is one of the problems of the scholars why the Latin conquerors called this hill the Zion Hill, when the other is obviously the sacred hill. Jerusalem is traditionally divided into four hills, but for practical purposes into two. The lower eastern hill, where stood the temple, and now stands the great mosque, and the western, where is the citadel and the Zion Gate to the south of it. I know nothing of such questions, and I attach no importance to the notion that has crossed my own mind and which I only mention in passing, for I have no doubt there are a hundred objections to it. But it is known that Zion or Zion was the old name of the place before it was stormed by David, and even afterwards the Jebusites remained on this western hill, and some compromise seemed to have been made with them. It is conceivable, I wonder, that even in the 12th century there lingered some local memory of what had once been a way of distinguishing Zion of the Jebusites from Salem of the Jews. The Zion Gate, however, is only a starting point here. If we go southeastward from it, we descend a steep and rocky path, from which can be caught the first and finest vision of what stands on the other hill to the east. The great mosque of Omar stands up like a peacock, lustrous with mosaics that are like plumes of blue and green. Scholars, I may say here, object to calling it the mosque of Omar on the petty and pedantic ground that it is not a mosque and it was not built by Omar. But it is my fixed intention to call it the mosque of Omar, and with ever renewed pertinacity to continue calling it the mosque of Omar. I possess a special permit from the grand mufti to call it the mosque of Omar. He is the head of the whole Muslim religion, and if he does not know, who does? He told me in the beautiful French, which matches his beautiful manners, that it really is not so ridiculous after all to call the place the mosque of Omar, since the great caliph desired and even designed such a building, though he did not build it. I suppose it is rather as if Solomon's temple had been called David's temple. Omar was a great man, and the mosque was a great work, and the two were telescoped together by the excellent common sense of vulgar tradition. There could not be a better example of that great truth for all travelers, that popular tradition is never so right as when it is wrong, and that pedantry is never so wrong as when it is right. And as for the other objection that the dome of the rock, to give it its other name, is not actually used as a mosque, I answer that Westminster abbey is not used as an abbey. But modern Englishmen would be much surprised if I were to refer to it as Westminster Church, to say nothing of the many modern Englishmen for whom it would be more suitable to call it Westminster Museum. And for whatever purposes the Muslims may actually use their great and glorious sanctuary, at least they have not allowed it to become the private house of a particular rich man, and that is what we have suffered to happen, if not to Westminster abbey, at least to Wellbeck abbey. The mosque of Omar, I repeat firmly, stands on the great eastern plateau in place of the temple, and the wall that runs round it on the south side of the city contains only the dung gate, on which the fancy need not linger. All along outside this wall the ground falls away into the southern valley, and upon the dreary and stony steep opposite is the place called Ekeldama. Wall and valley turn together round the corner of the great temple platform, and confronting the eastern wall across the ravine is the mighty wall of the Mount of Olives. On this side there are several gates now blocked up, of which the most famous, the Golden Gate, carries in its very uselessness a testimony to the fallen warriors of the cross, for there is a strange Muslim legend that through this gate, so solemnly sealed up, shall ride the Christian king, who shall again rule in Jerusalem. In the middle of the square enclosure rises the great dark dome of the rock, and standing near it a man may see for the first time in the distance another dome. It lies away to the west, but a little to the north, and is surmounted not by a crescent but a cross. Many heroes and holy kings have desired to see this thing, and have not seen it. It is very characteristic of the city, with its medieval medley and huddle of houses, that a man may first see the church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is in the west, by going as far as possible to the east. All the sites are glimpses, and things far can be visible and things near invisible. The traveler comes on the Muslim dome, round a corner, and he finds the Christian dome, as it were, behind his own back. But if he goes on round the wall to the northeast corner of the court of the temple, he will find the next entrance, the gate of St. Stephen. On the slope outside by a strange and suitable coincidence, the loose stones which lie on every side of the mountain city seem to be heaped higher, and across the valley, on the skirts of the Mount of Olives, is the great gray olive of Gethsemane. On the northern side the valley turns into an artificial trench, for the ground here is higher, and the next or northern gate bears the name of Herod, though it might well bear the name either of Godfrey or Saladin. For just outside it stands a pine tree, and beside it a rude bulk of stone, where stood these great captains in turn, before they took Jerusalem. Then the wall runs on till it comes to the great Damascus gate. Graven, I know not why with great roses, in a style wholly heraldic and occidental, and in no way likely to remind us of the rich roses of Damascus, though their name has passed into our own English tongue and tradition, along with another word for the delicate decoration of the sword. But at the first glance at any rate it is hard to believe that the roses on the walls are not the western roses of York or Lancaster, or that the swords which guarded them were not the straight swords of England or of France. Doubtless, a deeper and more solemn memory ought to return immediately to the mind, where that gate looks down on the great highway, as if one could see hung over it the sky for ever. The clouds concealing the sunburst that broods upon the road to Damascus. But I am here only confessing the facts or the fancies of my first impression, and again the fancy they came to me first, was not of any such alien or awful things. I did not think of Damascus or Damocene or the great Arabian city or even the conversion of St. Paul. I thought of my own little house in Buckinghamshire, and how the edge of the country town where it stands is called Alesbury End, merely because it is the corner nearest to Alesbury. That is what I mean by saying that these ancient customs are more rational and even utilitarian than the fashions of modernity. When a street in a new suburb is called Pretoria Avenue, the clerk living there does not set out from his villa, with the cheerful hope of finding the road leading him to Pretoria. But the man leaving Alesbury End does know it would lead him to Alesbury, and the man going out at the Damascus Gate did know it would lead him to Damascus. And the same is true of the next and last of the old entrances, the Jaffa Gate in the East. But when I saw that, I saw something else as well. I have heard that there is a low doorway at the entrance to a famous shrine which is called the Gate of Humility. But indeed, in this sense all gates are gates of humility and especially gates of this kind. Anyone who has ever looked at a landscape under an archway will know what I mean when I say that it sharpens a pleasure with a strange sentiment of privilege. It adds to the grace of distance something that makes it not only a grace, but a gift. Such are the visions of remote places that appear in the low gateways of a Gothic town, as if each gateway led into a separate world, and almost as if each dome of sky were a different chamber. But he who walks round the walls of this city in this spirit will come suddenly upon an exception, which will surprise him like an earthquake. It looks indeed rather like something done by an earthquake, an earthquake with half-witted sense of humor. Immediately at the side of one of these humble and human gateways there is a great gap in the wall, with a wide road running through it. There is something of unreason in the site which affects the eye as well as the reason. It recalls some crazy tale about the great works of the wise men of Gotham. It suggests the old joke about the man who made a small hole for the kitten as well as a large hole for the cat. Everybody has read about it by this time, but the immediate impression of it is not merely an effect of reading or even of reasoning. It looks lopsided, like something done by a one-eyed giant. But it was done by the last prince of the great Prussian imperial system in what was probably the proudest moment in all his life of pride. What is true has a way of sounding trite, and what is trite has a way of sounding false. We shall now probably weary the world with calling the German barbaric just as we very recently weary the world with calling them cultured and progressive and scientific. But the thing is true, though we say it a thousand times, and anyone who wishes to understand the sense in which it is true has only to contemplate that fantasy and fallacy in the stone, a gate with an open road beside it. The quality I mean, however, is not merely in that particular contrast as if a front door standing by itself in an open field. It is also in the origin, the occasion, and the whole story of the thing. There is above all this supreme stamp of the barbarian, the sacrifice of the permanent to the temporary. When the walls of the holy city were overthrown for the glory of the German emperor, it was hardly even for that everlasting glory which has been the vision and the temptation of great men. It was for the glory of a single day. It was something rather in the nature of a holiday than anything that could be even in the most vane glorious sense, a heritage. It did not, in the ordinary sense, make a monument or even a trophy. It destroyed a monument to make a procession. We might almost say that it destroyed a trophy to make a triumph. There is the true barbaric touch in this oblivion of what Jerusalem would look like a century after, or a year after, or even the day after. It is this which distinguishes the savage tribe on the march after a victory from the civilized army establishing a government, even if it be a tyranny. Hence the very effect of it, the effect of the whole Prussian adventure in history, remains something negative and even nihilistic. The Christians made the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Moslems made the Mosque of Omar. But this is what the most scientific culture made at the end of the great century of science. It made an enormous whole. The only positive contribution of the nineteenth century to the spot is an unnaturally ugly clock at the top of an ornamental tower, or a tower that was meant to be ornamental. It was erected, I believe, to commemorate the reign of Abdul Hamid, and it seems perfectly adapted to its purpose, like one of Sir William Watson's sonnets on the same subject. But this object only adds a touch of triviality to the much more tremendous negative effect of the gap by the gate. That remains a parable, as well as a puzzle. Under all the changing skies of day and night, with the shadows that gather tinder, the narrow gate of humility, and beside it blank as daybreak and abrupt as an abyss, the broad road that has led already to destruction. The gap remains, like a gash, a sort of wound in the wall. But it only strengthens by contrast the general sense of their continuity. Save this one angle where the nineteenth century has entered the vague impression of the thirteenth or fourteenth century rather deepens than dies away. It is supported more than many would have supposed, even by the figures that appear in the gateways or pass in the procession under the walls. The brown Franciscans and the white Dominicans would alone give some color to a memory of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. And there are other examples and effects which are less easily imagined in the West. Thus, as I look down the street, I see coming out from under an archway, a woman wearing a high white headdress, very like those we have all seen in a hundred pictures of tournaments or hunting parties, or the Canterbury pilgrimage, or the court of Louis XI. She is as wide as a woman of the North, and is not, I think, entirely fanciful to trace a certain freedom and dignity in her movement, which is quite different, at least, from the shuffling walk of the shrouded Muslim women. She is a woman of Bethlehem, where a tradition it is said still claims as a heroic heritage the blood of the Latin Knights of the Cross. This is, of course, but one aspect of the city, but it is one which may be early noted, yet one which is generally neglected. As I have said, I had expected many things of Jerusalem, but I had not expected this. I had expected to be disappointed with it as a place utterly profaned and fallen below its mission. I had expected to be awed by it. Indeed, I had expected to be frightened of it, as a place dedicated and even doomed by its mission. But I had never fancy that it would be possible to be fond of it, as one might be fond of a little wall-town among the orchards of Normandy, or the hop-fields of Kent. And then there happened a coincidence that was also something like a catastrophe. I was idly watching as it moved down the narrow street to one of the dark doorways. The headdress, like a tower of white drapery, belonged to the Christian woman from the place where Christ was born. After she had disappeared into the darkness of the porch, I continued to look vaguely at the porch, and thought how easily it might have been a small gothic gate in some old corner of the ruin or even canterbury. In twenty such places in the town, one may see the details that appear to the same associations, so different and so distant. One may see that angular dog-tooth ornament that makes the round Norman gateway look like the gaping mouths of sharks. One may see the pointed niches in the walls shaped like windows, and serving somewhat the purpose for brackets on which were to stand sacred images possibly removed by the Muslims. One may come upon a small court planted with ornamental trees with some monument in the center which makes it the precise impression of something in a small French town. There are no gothic spires, but there are numberless gothic doors and windows, and he who first strikes the place at this angle as it were may well feel the northern element as native and the eastern element as intrusive. While I was thinking all these things, something happened which in that place was almost a portent. It was very cold, and there were curious colors in the sky. There had been chilly rains from time to time and the whole air seemed to have taken on something sharper than a chill. It was as if a door had been open in the northern corner of the heavens, letting in something that changed all the face of the earth. Great gray clouds with halos of lurid pearl and pale green were coming up from the plains or the sea and spreading over the towers of the city. In the middle of the moving mass of gray vapors was a splash of paler vapor, a WAN white cloud whose white seemed somehow more ominous than gloom. It went over the high citadel like a white wild goose flying, and a few white feathers fell. It was the snow. And it's no day and night until that eastern city was sealed up like a village in Norway or northern Scotland. It rose in the streets till men might almost have been drowned in it like the sea of solid foam. And the people of the place told me there had been no such things seen in it in all recent records, or perhaps in the records of all its four thousand years. All this came later. But for me at the moment, looking at the scene in so dreamy a fashion, it seemed merely like a dramatic conclusion to my dream. It was but an accident confirming what was but an aspect. But it confirmed it with a strange and almost supernatural completeness. The white light out of the window in the north lay on all the roofs and turrets of the mountain town, for there is an aspect in which snow looks less like frozen water than like solidified light. As the snow accumulated, there accumulated also everywhere those fantastic effects of frost which seemed to fit in with the fantastic qualities of medieval architecture, and which make an icicle seam like the mere extension of a gargoyle. It was the atmosphere that has led so many romances to make medieval Paris a mere black and white study of night and snow. Something had redrawn in silver all things, from the rude ornament on the old gateways to the wrinkles on the ancient hills of Moeb. Fields of white still spotted with greens swept down into the valleys between us and the hills, and high above them the holy city lifted her head into the thunderclouded heavens, wearing a white headdress like the daughter of the Crusaders. Chapter 4 The Philosophy of Sightseeing Various cultivated critics told me that I should find Jerusalem disappointing, and I fear it will disappoint them that I am not disappointed. Of the city as a city I shall try to say something elsewhere, but the things which these critics have especially in mind are at once more general and more internal. They concern something tawdry, squalid or superstitious about the shrines and those who use them. Now the mistake of critics is not that they criticize the world, it is that they never criticize themselves. They compare the alien with the ideal, but they do not at the same time compare themselves with the ideal. Rather, they identify themselves with the ideal. I have met a tourist who had seen the great pyramid, and who told me that the pyramid looked small. Believe me, the tourist looked much smaller. There is indeed another type of traveller who is not at all small in the moral mental sense, who will confess such disappointments quite honestly as a piece of realism about his own sensations. In that case he generally suffers from the defect of most realists, that of not being realistic enough. He does not really think out his own impressions thoroughly, for he would generally find they are not so disappointing after all. A humorous soldier told me that he came from Derbyshire and that he did not think much of the pyramid because it was not so tall as the peak. I pointed out to him that he was really offering the tallest possible tribute to a work of man in comparing it to a mountain, even if he thought it was a rather small mountain. I suggested that it was a rather large tombstone. I appealed to those with whom I debated in that district as to whether they would not be faintly surprised to find such a monument during their quiet rambles in a country churchyard. I asked whether each one of them, if he had such a tombstone in the family, would not feel it natural, if hardly necessary to point it out, and that with a certain pride. The same principle of the higher realism applies to those who are disappointed with the sight of the Sphinx. The Sphinx really exceeds expectations because it escapes expectations. Monuments commonly look impressive when they are high and often when they are distant. The Sphinx is really unexpected because it is found suddenly in a hollow and unnaturally near. Its face is turned away, and the effect is as creepy as coming into a room apparently empty and finding somebody as still as the furniture. Or it is as if one found a lion couchant in that hole in the sand, as indeed the buried part of the monster is in the form of a couchant lion. If it was a real lion, it would hardly be less arresting merely because it was near, nor could the first emotion of the traveler be adequately described as disappointment. In such cases, there is generally some profit in looking at the monument a second time, or even at our own sensations a second time. So I reasoned, striving with wild critics in the wilderness. But the only part of the debate, which is relevant here, can be expressed in the statement that I do not think the pyramid big, for the deep and simple reason that it is bigger than I am. I delicately suggested to those who were disappointed in the Sphinx that it was just possible that the Sphinx was disappointed in them. The Sphinx has seen Julius Caesar. It has very probably seen St. Francis, and when he brought his flaming charity to Egypt it has certainly looked in the first high days of the revolutionary victories on the face of the young Napoleon. Is it not barely possible, I hinted to my friends and fellow tourists, that after these experiences it might be a little depressed at the sight of you and me? But as I say I only reintroduced my remarks in connection with a greater matter than these dead things of the desert, in connection with the tomb to which even the pyramids are but titanic lumber and a presence greater than the Sphinx, since it is not only a riddle, but an answer. Before I go on to deeper defenses of any such cult or culture, I wish first to know the sort of test for the first impressions of an ordinary tourist like myself, to whom much that is really full of an archaic strength may seem merely stiff, or much that really deals with a deep devotional psychology may seem merely distorted. In short I would put myself in the position of the educated Englishman who does quite honestly receive a mere impression of idolatry. Incidentally, I may remark, it is the educated Englishman who is the idolater. It is he who only reverences the place and does not reverence the reverence for the place. It is he who is supremely concerned about whether a mere object is old or new, or whether a mere ornament is gold or guilt. In other words, it is he who values the visible things rather than the invisible. For no sane man can doubt that invisible things are vivid to the priests and pilgrims of these shrines. In the midst of emotions that have moved the whole world out of its course, gird about with crowds who will die or do murder for a definition, the educated English gentleman in his blindness bows down to wood and stone, for the only thing wrong about that admirable man is that he is blind about himself. No man will really attempt to describe his feelings when he first stood at the gateway of the grave of Christ. The only record relevant here is that I did not feel the reaction, not to say repulsion, that many seem to have felt about its formal surroundings. Either I was particularly fortunate or others are particularly fastidious. The guide who showed me the sepulchre was not particularly noisy or profane or palpably mercenary. He was rather more than less sympathetic than the same sort of man who might have shown the Westminster Abbey or Stratford and Avon. He was a small, solemn, awlish old man, a Roman Catholic in religion, but so far from deserving the charge of not knowing the Bible, he deserved rather a gentle remonstrance against his assumption that nobody else knew it. If there was anything to smile at in association so sacred, it was the elaborate simplicity with which he told the first facts of the Gospel story as if he were evangelizing a savage. Anyhow he did not talk like a cheepjack at a stall, but rather like a teacher in an infant school. He made it very clear that Jesus Christ was crucified in case any one should suppose he was beheaded, and often stopped in his narrative to repeat that the hero of these events was Jesus Christ, lest we should fancy it was Nebuchadnezzar or the Duke of Wellington. I do not in the least mind being amused at this, but I have no reason whatever for doubting that he may have been a better man than I. I gave him what I should have given a similar guide in my own country. I parted from him as politely as from one of my own countrymen. I also, of course, gave money, as is the custom, to the various monastic custodians of the shrines. But I see nothing surprising about that. I am not quite so ignorant as not to know that without the monastic brotherhoods supported by such charity there would not by this time be anything to see in Jerusalem at all. There was only one class of men whose consistent concern was to watch these things from the age of heathens and heresies to the age of Turks and tourists, and I am certainly not going to sneer at them for doing no practical work and then refuse to pay them for the practical work they do. For the rest, even, the architectural defacement is overstated. The church was burned down and rebuilt in a bad and modern period. But the older parts, especially the Crusaders' porch, are as grand as the men who made them. The incongruities there are are those of local color. In connection, by the way, with what I said about beasts of burden, I mounted a series of steep staircases to the roof of the convent beside the Holy Sipulchre. When I got to the top I found myself in the placid presence of two camels. It would be curious to meet two cows on the roof of a village church. Nevertheless it is the only moral of the chapter interpolated here, that we can meet things quite as curious in our own country. When the critic says that Jerusalem is disappointing, he generally means that the popular worship there is weak and degraded, and especially that the religious art is gaudy and grotesque. And so far as there is any kind of truth in this, it is still true that the critic seldom sees the whole truth. What is wrong with the critic is that he does not criticize himself. He does not honestly compare what is weak in this particular world of ideas with what is weak in his own world of ideas. I will take an example from my own experience, and in a manner at my own expense. If I have a native heath, it is certainly Kensington High Street, off which stands the house of my childhood. I grew up in that thoroughfare, which Mr. Max Beerbaum, with his usual easy exactitude of phrase, has described as dapper with a leaning to the fine arts. Dapper was never perhaps a descriptive term for myself, but it is quite true that I owe a certain taste for the arts to the sort of people among whom I was brought up. It is also true that such a taste in various forms and degrees was fairly common in the world, which may be symbolized as Kensington High Street. And whether or know it is a tribute, it is certainly a truth that most people with an artistic turn in Kensington High Street would have been very much shocked in their sense of propriety if they had seen the popular shrines of Jerusalem. The sham gold, the garish colors, the fantastic tails and the feverish tumult. But what I want such people to do, and what they never do, is to turn this truth around. I want them to imagine not a Kensington esthete walking down David Street to the Holy Sepulchre, but a Greek muck or a Russian pilgrim walking down Kensington High Street to Kensington Gardens. I will not insist here on all the hundred plagues of plutocracy that would really surprise such a Christian peasant, especially that curse of an irreligious society unknown in religious societies, Muslim as well as Christian, the detestable denial of all dignity to the poor. I am not speaking now of moral but of artistic things, of the concrete arts and crafts used in popular worship. Well, my imaginary pilgrim would walk past Kensington Gardens till his site was blasted by a prodigy. He would either fall on his knees as before a shrine, or cover his face as from a sacrilege. He would have seen the Albert Memorial. There is nothing so conspicuous in Jerusalem. There is nothing so gilded and gaudy in Jerusalem. Above all there is nothing in Jerusalem that is on so large a scale and at the same time in so gay and glittering a style. My simple Eastern Christian would almost certainly be driven to cry aloud to what superhuman God was this enormous temple erected. I hope it is Christ, but I fear it is antichrist. Such you would think might well be the great and golden image of the Prince of the World, set up in this great open space to receive the heathen prayers and heathen sacrifices of a lost humanity. I fancy he would feel the desire to be at home again amid the humble shrines of Zion. I really cannot imagine what he would feel if he were told that the gilded idol was neither a god nor a demon, but a petty German prince who had some slight influence in turning us into the tools of Prussia. Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens is something quite natural. I feel it so because I had been brought up, so to speak, under its shadow and stared at the graven images of Raphael and Shakespeare, almost before I knew their names, and long before I saw anything funny in their figures being carved on a smaller scale under the feet of Prince Albert. I even took a certain childish pleasure in the gilding of the canopy and inspire, as if in the golden palace of what was, to Peter Pan and all children, something of a fairy garden. So do the Christians of Jerusalem take pleasure and possibly a childish pleasure in the gilding of a better palace besides a noble garden, ornamented with a somewhat worthier aim. But the point is that the people of Kensington, whatever they might think about the Holy Sepulchre, do not think anything at all about the Albert Memorial. They are quite unconscious of how strange a thing it is, and that simply because they are used to it. The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their colored background, and they are surely none the worse if they still feel rather more of the meaning of the colors. It may be said that they retain their childish illusion about their Albert Memorial. I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where a special curse was laid on those who can become like little children. And I never could understand why such critics who agree that the kingdom of heaven is for children should forbid it to be the only sort of kingdom the children would really like, a kingdom with real crowns of gold or even of tinsel. But that is another question, which I shall discuss in another place. The point is for the moment that such people would be quite as much surprised at the place of tinsel in our lives as we are at its place in theirs. If we are critical of the petty things they do to glorify great things, they would find quite as much to criticize as in Kensington Gardens in the great things we do to glorify petty things. If we wonder at the way in which they seem to gild the lily, they would wonder quite as much at the way we gild the weed. There are countless other examples of course of this principle of self-criticism as the necessary condition of all criticism. It applies quite as much, for instance, to the other great complaint which my Kensington friend would make after the complaint about poultry ornament, the complaint about what is commonly called backsheesh. Here again there is really something to complain of, though much of the fault is not due to Jerusalem, but rather to London and New York. The worst superstition of Jerusalem, like the worst profligacy of Paris, is the thing so much invented for Anglo-Saxons that it might be called an Anglo-Saxon institution. But here again the critic could only really judge fairly. If he realized with what abuse is at home he ought really to compare this particular abuse abroad. He ought to imagine, for example, the feelings of a religious Russian peasant if he really understood all the highly colored advertisements covering High Street Kensington Station. It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money, and advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires all holding out their silk hats for a penny, or all shouting with one voice, give me money. Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as a shout would assault the ear. Budge boots are the best simply means give me money. Use serific soap simply means give me money. It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns common place with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses. To see such men crowding and clamoring for more wealth would really be a more unworthy sight than a scramble of poor guides. Yet this is what would be conveyed by all the glare of gaudy advertisement to anybody who saw and understood it for the first time. Yet for us who are familiar with it all that gaudy advertisement fades into a background just as the gaudy Oriental patterns fade into a background for those Oriental priests and pilgrims. Just as the innocent Kensington gentleman is wholly unaware that his black top hat is relieved against a background or encircled as by a halo of a yellow hoarding about muster, so is the poor guide sometimes unaware that his small doings are dark against the fainter and more fading gold in which are traced only the humbler halos of the twelve apostles. But all these misunderstandings are merely convenient illustrations and introductions, leading up to the great fact of the main misunderstanding. It is a misunderstanding of the whole history and philosophy of the position, that is, the whole story and the whole moral of the story. The critic of the Christianity of Jerusalem emphatically manages to miss the point. The lesson he ought to learn from it is one which the western and modern man needs most and does not even know that he needs. It is the lesson of constancy. These people may decorate their temples with gold or with tinsel, but their tinsel has lasted longer than our gold. They may build things as costly and ugly as the Albert Memorial, but the thing remains a memorial, a thing of immortal memory. They do not build it for a passing fashion and then forget it, or try hard to forget it. They may paint a picture of a saint as gaudy as any advertisement of a soap, but one saint does not drive out another saint as one soap drives out another soap. They do not forget their recent idolatries as the educated English are now trying to forget their very recent idolatry of everything German. These Christian bodies have been in Jerusalem for at least fifteen hundred years. Say, for a few years after the time of Constantine and a few years after the first crusade, they have been practically persecuted all the time. At least they have been under heathen masters whose attitude for Christendom was hatred and whose type of government was despotism. No man living in the West can form the faintest conception of what it must have been to live in the very heart of the East through the long and seemingly everlasting epic of Muslim power. A man in Jerusalem was in the center of the Turkish Empire as a man in Rome was in the center of the Roman Empire. The imperial power of Islam stretched away to the sunrise and the sunset westward to the mountains of Spain and eastward toward the Wall of China. It must have seemed as if the whole earth belonged to Muhammad, to those who in this rocky city renew their hopeless witness to Christ. What we have to ask ourselves is not whether we happen in all respects to agree with them, but whether we in the same condition should even have the courage to agree with ourselves. It is not a question of how much of their religion is superstition, but of how much of our religion is convention, how much is custom, and how much of compromise even with custom, how much a thing made facile by the security of our own society or the success of our own state. These are powerful supports, and the enlightened Englishman from a cathedral town or a suburban chapel walks these wild eastern places with a certain sense of assurance and stability. Even after centuries of Turkish supremacy such a man feels he would not have descended to such credulity. He would not be fighting for the Holy Fire or wrangling with beggars in the Holy Sepulchre. He would not be hanging fantastic lamps on a pillar peculiar to the Armenians or peering into the gilded cage that contains the brown Madonna of the cops. He would not be the dupe of such degenerate fables. God forbid, he would not be groveling at such grotesque shrines. No indeed. He would be many hundred yards away, decorously bowing towards a more distant city, where above the only formal and official open place in Jerusalem, the mighty mosaics of the mosque of Omar proclaim across the valleys the victory and the glory of Muhammad. That is the real lesson that the enlightened traveler should learn. A lesson about himself. That is the test that should really be put to those who say that the Christianity of Jerusalem is degraded. After a thousand years of Turkish tyranny, the religion of a London fashionable preacher would not be degraded. It would be destroyed. It would not be there at all to be jeered at by every prosperous tourist out of a trained deluxe. It is worthwhile to pause upon the point, for nothing has been so wholly missed in our modern religious ideals as the ideal of tenacity. Fashion is called progress. Every new fashion is called a new faith. Every faith is a faith which offers everything except faithfulness. It was never so necessary to insist that most of the really vital and valuable ideas in the world, including Christianity, would never have survived at all if they had not survived their own death, even in the sense of dying daily. The ideal was out of date almost from the first day. That is why it is eternal. For whatever is dated is doomed. As for our own society, if it proceeds at its present rate of progress and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all. Some think that this would be an improvement in itself. We have come to live morally, as the Japanese live literally, in houses of paper. But they are pavilions made of the morning papers which have to be burned on the appearance of the evening editions. Well, a thousand years hence the Japanese may be ruling in Jerusalem, the modern Japanese who no longer live in paper houses but in sweated factories and slums. They on the Chinese, that much more dignified and democratic people, seem to be about the only people of importance who have not yet ruled Jerusalem. But though we may think the Christian chapels as thin as Japanese teahouses, they will still be Christian. Though we may think the sacred lamps as cheap as Chinese lanterns, they will still be burning before a crucified creator of the world. But beside this need of making strange cults, the test not of themselves but ourselves, the sites of Jerusalem also illustrate the other suggestion about the philosophy of sightseeing. It is true, as I have suggested, that after all the Sphinx is larger than I am, and on the same principle the painted saints are saintlier than I am, and the patient pilgrims more constant than I am. But it is also true, as in the lesser matter before mentioned, that even those who think the Sphinx small generally do not notice the small things about it. They do not even discover what is interesting about their own disappointment. And similarly, even those who are truly irritated by the unfamiliar fashions of worship in a place like Jerusalem, do not know how to discover what is interesting in the very existence of what is irritating. For instance, they talk of Byzantine decay or barbaric delusion, and they generally go away with an impression that their ritual and symbolism is something dating from the Dark Ages. But if they would really note the details of their surroundings or even of their sensations, they would observe a rather curious fact about such ornament of such places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as may really be counted unworthy of them. They would realize that what they would most instinctively reject as superstition does not date from what they would regard as the ages of superstition. There really are bad pictures, but they are not barbaric pictures, they are floored pictures in the last faded realism of the Renaissance. There really is stiff and ungainly decoration, but it is not the harsh or ascetic decoration of a Spanish cloister. It is much more like the pompous, yet frivolous decorations of a Parisian hotel. In short, insofar as the shrine has really been defaced, it has not been defaced by the Dark Ages, but rather, if anything, by the age of reason. It is the enlightened eighteenth century which regarded itself as the very noon day of natural culture and common sense that has really, though indirectly, laid its disfiguring finger on the dark but dignified Byzantine temple. I do not particularly mind it myself, for in such great matters I do not think taste is the test. But if taste is to be made the test, there is matter for momentary reflection in this fact, for it is another example of the weakness of what may be called fashion. Voltaire, I believe, erected a sort of temple to God in his own garden, and we may be sure that it was in the most exquisite taste of the time. Nothing would have surprised him more than to learn that, fifty years after the success of the French Revolution, almost every free thinker of any artistic taste would think his temple far less artistically admirable than the nearest gargoyle on the Notre Dame. Thus it is progress that must be blamed for most of these things, and we ought not to turn away in contempt from something antiquated, but rather recognize with respect, and even alarm, a sort of permanent mantrap in the idea of being modern, so that the moral of this matter is the same as that of the other, that these things should raise in us not merely the question of whether we like them, but of whether there is anything very infallible or imperishable about what we like. At least the essentials of these things endure, and if they seem to have remained fixed as effigies, at least they have not faded like fashion plates. It has seemed worthwhile to insert here this note on the philosophy of sightseeing however delitory or disproportionate it may seem, or I am particularly and positively convinced that unless these things can somehow or other be seen in the right historical perspective and philosophical proportions, they are not worth seeing at all. And let me say in conclusion that I cannot only respect the sincerity but understand the sentiments of a man who says they are not worth seeing at all. Sightseeing is a far more difficult and disputable matter than many seem to suppose, and a man refusing it altogether might be a man of sense, and even a man of imagination. It was the great Wordsworth who refused to visit Yarrow. It was only the small Wordsworth who revisited it after all. I remember the first great sight in my own entrance to the Near East when I looked by accident out of the train going to Cairo and saw far away across the luminous flats a faint triangular shape in the pyramids. I could understand a man who had seen it turning his back and retaching his old journey to his own country and his own home, saying I will go no further for I have seen a far off the last houses of the kings. I can understand a man who had only seen in the distance Jerusalem sitting on the hill going no further and keeping that vision forever. It would, of course, be said that it was absurd to come at all and to see so little, to which I answer that in that sense it is absurd to come at all. It is no more fantastic to turn back for such a fancy than it was to come for a similar fancy. A man cannot eat the pyramids. He cannot buy or sell the holy city. There can be no practical aspect either of his coming or going. If he has not come for a poetic mood, he has come for nothing. If he has come for such a mood, he is not a fool to obey that mood. The way to be really a fool is to try to be practical about unpractical things. It is to try to collect clouds or preserve moonshine like money. Now there is much to be said for the view that to search for a mood is in its nature moonshine. It may be said that this is especially true in the crowded and commonplace conditions in which most sight seeing has to be done. It may be said that thirty tourists going together to see a tombstone is really as ridiculous as thirty poets going together to write poems about the nightingale. There would be something rather depressing about a crowd of travelers walking over hill and dale after the celebrated cloud of Wordsworth, especially if the crowd is like the cloud and move it all together if it moved at all. A vast mob assembled on Sellisbury plain to listen to Shelley Skylark would probably after an hour or two consider it a rather subdued sort of skylarking. It may be argued that it is just as illogical to hope to fix beforehand the elusive effects of the works of man as of the works of nature. It may be called a contradiction in terms to expect the unexpected. It may be counted mere madness to anticipate astonishment or to go in search of a surprise, to all of which there is only one answer, that such anticipation is absurd and such realization will be disappointing, that images will seem to be idols and idols will seem to be dolls, unless there be some rudiment of such a habit of mind as I have tried to suggest in this chapter. No great works will seem great and no wonders of the world will seem wonderful unless the angle from which they are seen is that of historical humility. One more word may be added of a more practical sort. The place where the most passionate convictions on this planet are concentrated is not one where it will always be wise, even from a political standpoint, to air our plutocratic patronage and our skeptical superiority. Strange scenes have already been enacted round that flame where the holy fire bursts forth to declare that Christ is risen, and whether or no we think the thing holy, there is no doubt about it being fiery. Whether or no the superior person is right to expect the unexpected, it is possible that something may be revealed to him that he really does not expect. And whatever he may think about the philosophy of sightseeing, it is not unlikely that he may see some sights.