 11 The Meaning of the Crusade There are three examples of western work on the great eastern slope of the Mount of Olives, when they form a sort of triangle illustrating the truths about the different influences of the west on the east. At the foot of the hill is the garden kept by the Franciscans on the alleged side of Gethsemane, and containing the hoary olive that is supposed to be the terrible tree of the agony of Christ. Given the great age and slow growth of the olives, the tradition is not so unreasonable as some may suppose. But whether or not it is historically right, it is not artistically wrong. The instinct, if it was only an instinct, that made men fix upon this strange growth of gray and twisted wood, was a true imaginative instinct. One of the strange qualities of this strange southern tree is its almost startling hardness. Accidentally to strike the branch of an olive is like striking a rock. With its stony surface, stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is often more like a grotto than a tree. Hence it does not seem so unnatural that it should be treated as a holy grotto, or that this strange vegetation should claim to stand for ever like a sculptured monument. Even the shimmering or shivering silver foliage of the living olive might well have a legend like that of the Aspen, as if it had grown gray with fear from the apocalyptic paradox of a divine vision of death. A child from one of the villages said to me, in broken English, that it was the place where God said his prayers. I for one could not ask a finer, more defiant statement of all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew—Credo quay impossible. On this terrible spot the Franciscans have done something which will strike many good and thoughtful people as quite fantastically inadequate, and which strikes me as fantastically but precisely right. They have laid out the garden simply as a garden, in a way that is completely natural because it is completely artificial. They have made flower beds in the shape of stars and moons, and colored them with flowers like those in the backyard of a cottage. The combination of these bright patterns in the sunshine with the awful shadow in the center is certainly an incongruity in the sense of a contrast, but it is a poetical contrast like that of birds building in a temple or flowers growing on a tomb. The best way of suggesting what I for one feel about it would be something like this. As we imagine a company of children, such as those whom Christ blessed in Jerusalem, afterwards put permanently in charge of a field full of his sorrow. It is probable that if they could do anything with it they would do something like this. They might cut it up into quaint shapes and dot it with red daisies or yellow marigolds. I really do not know that there is anything better that grown-up people could do, since anything that the greatest of them could do must be, must look quite as small. Shall I, the nant that dances in thy ray, dare to be reverent? The Franciscans have not dared to be reverent. They have only dared to be cheerful. It may be too awful an adventure of the imagination to imagine Christ in that garden. There is not the smallest difficulty about imagining St. Francis there, and that is something to say of an institution which is eight hundred years old. Immediately above this little garden, overshadowing and almost overhanging it, is a gorgeous gilded building with golden domes and minarets glittering in the sun and filling a splendid situation with almost shameless splendor. The Russian church built over the upper part of the garden, belonging to the Orthodox Greeks. Here again many Western travelers will be troubled, and will think that golden building much too like a fairy palace in a pantomime. But here again I shall differ from them, though perhaps less strongly. It may be that the pleasure is childish rather than childlike. But I can imagine a child clapping his hands at the mere sight of those great domes, like bubbles of gold against the blue sky. It is a little like Aladdin's palace, but it has a place in art, as Aladdin has a place in literature, especially since it is Oriental literature. Those wise missionaries in China, who were not afraid to depict the twelve apostles in the costume of Chinaman, might have built such a church in a land of littering mosques. And as it is said that the Russian has in him something of the child and something of the Oriental, such a style may be quite sincere, and have even a certain simplicity in its splendor. It is genuine of its kind. It was built for those who like it, and those who do not like it can look at something else. This sort of thing may be called tawdry, but it is not what I call meretricious. What I call really meretricious can be found yet higher on the hill, towering to the sky and dominating all the valleys. The nature of the difference, I think, is worth noting. The German hospice, which served as a sort of palace for the German Emperor, is a very big building with a very high tower, planned, I believe, with great efficiency, solidity and comfort, and fitted with a thousand things that mark its modernity, compared with the things around. With the quaint garden of the Franciscans, or the fantastic temple of the Russians. It is what I can only describe as a handsome building, rather as the more vulgar of the Victorian wits used to talk about a fine woman. By calling it a handsome building, I mean that from the top of its dizzy tower to the bottom of its deepest foundations, there is not one line or one tint of beauty. This negative fact, however, would be nothing. It might be honestly ugly and utilitarian, like a factory or a prison. But it is not. It is as pretentious as the gilded dome below it, and it is pretentious in a wicked way, where the other is pretentious in a good and innocent way. What annoys me about it is that it was not built by children or even by savages but by professors, and the professors could profess the art and could not practice it. The architects knew everything about a Romanesque building except how to build it. We feel that they accumulated on that spot all the learning and organization and information and wealth of the world to do this one particular thing, and then did it wrong. They did it wrong, not through superstition, not through fanatical exaggeration, not through provincial ignorance, but through pure, profound, internal, intellectual incompetence. That intellectual incompetence which so often goes with intellectual pride. I will mention only one matter out of a hundred. All the columns in the Kaiser's Chapel are in one way very suitable to their place. Every one of them has a swelled head. The column itself is slender, but the capital is not only big but bulging, and it has the air of bulging downwards as if pressing heavily on something too slender to support it. This is false, not to any of the particular schools of architecture about which professors can read in libraries, but to the inmost instinctive idea of architecture itself. A Norman capital can be heavy because the Norman column is thick, and the whole thing expresses an elephantine massiveness and repose. And a Gothic column can be slender because its strength is energy, and is expressed in its line, which shoots upward like the life of a tree, like the jet of a fountain or even like the rush of a rocket. The slender thing beneath, obviously oppressed by a bloated thing above, suggests weakness by one of those miraculous mistakes that are as precisely wrong as masterpieces are precisely right. And to all this is added the intolerable intuition that the Russians and the Franciscans, even if we credit them with fantastic ignorance, are at least looking up at the sky, and we know how the learned Germans would look down upon them from their monstrous tower upon the hill. And this is as true of the moral as of the artistic elements in the modern Jerusalem. To show that I am not unjustly partisan, I will say frankly that I see little to complain of in that common subject of complaint, the mosaic portrait of the emperor on the ceiling of the chapel. It is but one among many figures, and it is not an unknown practice to include a figure of the founder in such church decorations. The real example of that startling moral stupidity which marked the barbaric imperialism can be found in another figure of which, curiously enough, considerably less notice seems to have been taken. It is the more remarkable, because it is but an artistic shadow of the actual fact, and merely records in outline and relief the temporary masquerade in which the man walked about in broad daylight. I mean the really astounding trick of dressing himself up as a crusader. That was, under the circumstances, far more ludicrous and lunatico proceeding than if he had filled the whole ceiling with cherub heads with his own features, or festooned all the walls with one ornamental pattern of his mustaches. The German emperor came to Jerusalem under the escort of the Turks as the ally of the Turks, and solely because of the victory and supremacy of the Turks. In other words, he came to Jerusalem solely because the crusaders had lost Jerusalem. He came there solely because the crusaders had been routed, runed, butchered, before and after the disaster of Hetyn, because the cross had gone down in blood before the Crescent, under which alone he could ride in with safety. Under those circumstances, to dress up as a crusader, as if for a fancy dress ball, was a mixture of madness and vulgarity which literally stops the breath. There is no need whatever to blame him for being in alliance with the Turks. Hundreds of people have been in alliance with the Turks. The English especially have been far too much in alliance with them. But if anyone wants to appreciate the true difference, distinct from all the cant of newspaper nationality, between the English and the Germans, who were clashed together by the same newspapers a little time before the war, let him take this single incident as a test. Lord Palmerston, for instance, was a firm friend of the Turks. Imagine Lord Palmerston appearing in chain mail and the shield of a Red Cross Knight. It is obvious enough that Palmerston would have said that he cared no more for the Crusade than for the Siege of Troy, that his diplomacy was directed by practical patriotic considerations of the moment, and that he regarded the religious wars of the twelfth century as a rubbish heap of remote superstitions. In this he would be quite wrong, but quite intelligible and quite sincere. An English aristocrat of the nineteenth century, inheriting from the English aristocrats of the eighteenth century, whose views were simply those of Voltaire. And these things are something of an allegory. For the Voltaarian version of the Crusades is still by far the most reasonable of all merely hostile views of the Crusades. If they were not a creative movement of religion, then they were simply a destructive movement of superstition. And whether we agree with Voltaire in calling it superstition or the Villajardouin in calling it religion, at least both these clear-headed Frenchmen would agree that the motive did exist and did explain the facts. But just as there is a clumsy German building with statues that at once patronize and parody the Crusaders, so there is a clumsy German theory that at once patronizes and minimizes the Crusades. According to this theory, the essential truth about a Crusade was that it was not a Crusade. It was something that the professors in the old days before the war used to call a Teutonic folk wandering. Godfrey and St. Louis were not, as Villajardouin would say, fighting for the truth. They were not even as Voltaire would say. Fighting for what they thought was the truth. This was only what they thought they thought, and they were really thinking of something entirely different. They were not moved either by piety or priestcraft, but by a new and unexpected nomadism. They were not inspired either by faith or fanaticism, but by an unusually aimless taste for foreign travel. This theory, that the war of the two great religions could be explained by Wanderlust, was current about twenty years ago among the historical professors of Germany, and with many of their other views was often accepted by the historical professors of England. It was swallowed by an earthquake, along with other rubbish, in the year 1914. Since then, so far as I know, the only person who has been patient enough to dig it up again is Mr. Ezra Pound. He is well known as an American poet, and he is, I believe, a man of great talent and information. His attempt to recover the old teutonic theory of the folk wandering of Peter the Hermit was expressed, however, in prose, in an article in The New Age. I have no reason to doubt that he was to be counted among the most loyal of our allies, but he is evidently one of those who, quite without being pro-German, still manages to be German. The teutonic theory was very teutonic. Like the German hospice on the hill, it was put together with great care and knowledge, and it is rotten from top to bottom. I do not understand, for that matter, why that alliance which we enjoy with Mr. Pound should not be treated in the same way as the other historical event, or why the war should not be an example of the wanderlust. Surely the American army in France must have drifted eastward merely through the same vague nomadic need as the Christian army in Palestine. Surely Pershing as well as Peter the Hermit was merely a rather restless gentleman who found his health improved by frequent changes seen. The Americans said and perhaps thought that they were fighting for democracy, and the Crusaders said and perhaps thought that they were fighting for Christianity, but as we know what the Crusaders meant better than they did themselves, I cannot quite understand why we do not enjoy the same valuable omniscience about the Americans. Indeed, I do not see why we should not enjoy it, for it would be very enjoyable about any individual American. Surely it was this vague vagabond spirit that moved Mr. Pound not only to come to England, but in a fashion to come to Fleet Street. A dim, tribal tendency, vast and invisible as the wind, carried him and his article like an autumn leaf to a light on the new age doorstep, or in a blind aboriginal impulse, wholly without rational motive, led him one day to put on his hat and go out with his article in an envelope and put it in a pillar box. It is vain to correct by cold logic the power of such primitive appetites. Nature herself was behind the seemingly random thoughtlessness of the deed. And now that it is irrevocably done, he can look back on it and trace the large lines of an awful law of averages, wherein it is ruled by a ruthless necessity that a certain number of such Americans should write a certain number of such articles as the leaves fall or the flowers return. In plain words, this sort of theory is a blasphemy against the intellectual dignity of man. It is a blunder as well as a blasphemy, for it goes miles out of its way to find a bestial explanation when there is obviously a human explanation. It is as if a man told me that a dim survival of the instinct of a quadruped was the reason of my sitting on the chair with four legs. I answer that I do it because I foresee there may be grave disadvantages in sitting on a chair with one leg. Or it is as if I were told that I like to swim in the sea solely because some early forms of amphibian life came out of the sea onto the shore. I answer that I know why I swim in the sea, and it is because the divine gift of reason tells me that it would be unsatisfactory to swim on the land. In short, this sort of vague evolutionary theorizing simply amounts to finding an unconvincing explanation of something that needs no explanation. And the case is really quite as simple, with great political and religious movements, by which man has from time to time changed the world in this or that respect in which he happened to think it would be the better for a change. The Crusade was a religious movement, but it was also a perfectly rational movement. One might almost say a rationalist movement. I could quite understand Mr. Pound saying that such a campaign for a creed was immoral, and indeed it often has been, and now perhaps generally is, quite horribly immoral. But when he implies that it is irrational, he has selected exactly the thing which it is not. It is not enlightenment. On the contrary, it is ignorance and insularity, which causes most of us to miss this fact. But it certainly is the fact that religious war is in itself much more rational than patriotic war. High for one have often defended an even encouraged patriotic war, and should always be ready to defend and encourage patriotic passion. But it cannot be denied that there is more of a mere passion, of a mere preference and prejudice, in short of mere personal accident, in fighting another nation than in fighting another faith. The Crusader is in every sense more rational than the modern conscript or professional soldier. He is more rational in his object, which is the intelligent and intelligible object of conversion, where the modern militarist has an object much more confused by momentary vanity and one sided satisfaction. The Crusader wished to make Jerusalem a Christian town, but the Englishman does not wish to make Berlin an English town. He has only a healthy hatred of it as a Prussian town. The Muslim wished to make the Christian a Muslim, but even the Prussian did not wish to make the Frenchman a Prussian. He only wished to make the Frenchman admire a Prussian, and not only were the means he adopted somewhat ill-considered for this purpose, but the purpose itself is looser and more irrational. The object of all war is peace, but the object of religious war is mental as well as material peace. It is an agreement. In short, religious war aims ultimately at equality, where national war aims relatively at superiority. Conversion is the one sort of conquest in which the conquered must rejoice. In that sense alone it is foolish for us in the West to sneer at those who kill men when a foot is set in a holy place, when we ourselves kill hundreds of thousands when a foot is put across a frontier. It is absurd for us to despise those who shed blood for a relic when we have shed rivers of blood for a rag. But above all the crusade, or for that matter the jihad, is by far the most philosophical sort of fighting, not only in its conception of ending the difference, but in its mere act of recognizing the difference as the deepest kind of difference. It is to reverse all reason to suggest that a man's politics matter and his religion does not matter. It is to say he is affected by the town he lives in but not the world he lives in. It is to say that he is altered when he is a fellow citizen walking under new lamp-posts, but not altered when he is another creature walking under strange stars. It is exactly as if he were to say that two people ought to live in the same house, but it need not be in the same town. It is exactly as if we said that so long as the address included York it did not matter whether it was New York, or that so long as a man is in Essex we do not care whether he is in England. Christendom would have been entirely justified in the abstract in being alarmed or suspicious at the mere rise of a great power that was not Christian. Nobody nowadays would think it odd to express regret at the rise of a power because it was militarist or socialist or even protectionist, but it is far more natural to be conscious of differences not about the order of battle but the battle of life, not about our definable enjoyment of possessions but about our much more doubtful possession of enjoyment, not about the physical divisions between us and foreigners, but about the spiritual divisions even between us and friends. These are the things that differ profoundly with differing views of the ultimate nature of the universe. For the things of our country are often distant, but the things of our cosmos are always near. We can shut our doors upon the wheel traffic of our native town, but in our own inmost chamber we hear the sound that never ceases. That wheel which Dante and a popular proverb have dared to christen as the love that makes the world go round. For this is the great paradox of life, that there are not only wheels within wheels, but the larger wheels within the smaller. When a whole community rests on one conception of life and death and the origin of things, it is quite entitled to watch the rise of another community founded on another conception as the rise of something certain to be different and likely to be hostile. Indeed as I have pointed out touching certain political theories, we already admit this truth in its small and questionable examples. We only deny the large and obvious examples. Christendom might quite reasonably have been alarmed if it had not been attacked. But as a matter of history it had been attacked. The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem, even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger. But as a matter of history he was already an old enemy. The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Tibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost written into Paris. They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine, it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe. There was no need for them to argue by an appeal to reason, as I have argued above, that a religious division must make a difference. It had already made a difference. The difference stared them in the face in the startling transformation of Roman Barbary and of Roman Spain. In short it was something which must happen in theory and which did happen in practice. All expectations suggested that it would be so, and all experience said it was so. Having thought it out theoretically and experienced it practically, they proceeded to deal with it equally practically. The first division involved every principle of the science of thought, and the last developments followed out every principle of the science of war. The Crusade was the counterattack. It was the defensive army taking the offensive in its turn and driving back the enemy to his base. And it is this process, reasonable from its first axiom to its last act, that Mr. Pound actually selects as a sort of automatic wandering of an animal. But a man so intelligent would not have made a mistake so extraordinary, but for another error which is here very essential to consider. It suggests that men engaged rightly or wrongly in so logical a military and political operation where only migrating like birds or swarming like bees is as ridiculous as to say that the prohibition campaign in America was only an animal reversion towards lapping as the dog lappeth, or Roland Hill's introduction of postage stamps and animal taste for licking as the cat licks. Why should we provide other people with a remote reason for their own actions when they themselves are ready to tell us the reason, and it is a perfectly reasonable reason? I have compared this pompous imposture of scientific history to the pompous and clumsy building of the scientific Germans on the Mount of Olives, because it substitutes in the same way a modern stupidity for the medieval simplicity. Just as the German hospice after all stands on a fine site and might have been a fine building, so there is after all another truth somewhat analogous with the German historians and the folk wandering might possibly have meant as distinct from all that they have actually said. There is indeed one respect in which the case of the Crusades does differ very much from modern political cases like prohibition or the penny post. I do not refer to such incidental peculiarities as the fact that prohibition could only have succeeded through the enormous power of modern plutocracy, or that even the convenience of the postage goes along with an extreme coercion by the police. It is a somewhat deeper difference than I mean, and it may possibly be what these critics mean, but the difference is not in the evolutionary, but rather in the revolutionary spirit. The first Crusade was not a racial migration. It was something much more intellectual and dignified, a riot. In order to understand this religious war, we must class it not so much with the wars of history as with the revolutions of history. As I shall try to show briefly on a later page, yet not only had all the peculiar good and peculiar evil of things like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, but it was a more purely popular revolution than either of them. The truly modern mind will of course regard the contention that it was popular as tantamount to a confession that it was animal. And these days when papers and speeches are full of words like democracy and self-determination, anything really resembling the movement of a mass of angry men is regarded as no better than a stampede of bulls or a scurry of rats. The new sociologist calls the herd instinct, just as the old reactionaries called it the many-headed beast. But both agree in implying that it is hardly worthwhile to count how many head there are of such cattle. In face of such fashionable comparisons it will seem comparatively mild to talk of migration as it occurs among birds or insects. Nevertheless we may venture to stay with some confidence that both the sociologist and the reactionaries are wrong. It does not follow that human beings become less than human because their ideas appeal to more and more of humanity. Nor can we deduce that men are mindless solely from the fact that they are all of one mind. In plain fact the virtues of a mob cannot be found in a herd of bulls or a pack of wolves any more than the crimes of a mob can be committed by a flock of sheep or a shoal of herrings. Birds have never been known to besiege and capture an empty cage of an aviary on a point of principle merely because it had kept a few other birds in captivity as the mob besieged and captured the almost empty bestial merely because it was the fortress of a historic tyranny. And rats have never been known to die by thousands merely in order to visit a particular trap in which a particular rat had perished as the poor peasants of the first crusade died in thousands for a fire-off sight of the sepulcher or a fragment of the true cross. In this sense indeed the crusade was not rationalistic, as the rat is the only rationalist. But it will seem more truly rational to point out that the inspiration of such a crowd is not in such instincts as we share with animals, but precisely in such ideas as the animals never with all their virtues understand. What is peculiar about the first crusade is that it was in quite a new and abnormal sense a popular movement. I might almost say it was the only popular movement there ever was in the world. For it was not a thing which the populace followed, it was actually a thing which the populace led. It was not only essentially a revolution, but it was the only revolution I know of, in which the masses began by acting alone and practically without any support from any of the classes. When they had acted the classes came in, and it is perfectly true and indeed only natural that the masses alone failed where the two together succeeded. But it was the uneducated who educated the educated. The case of the crusade is emphatically not a case in which certain ideas were first suggested by a few philosophers and then preached by demagogues to the democracy. This was to a great extent true of the French Revolution. It was probably yet more true of the Russian Revolution. And we need not hear pause upon the fine shade of difference that Rousseau was right and Karl Marx was wrong. In the first crusade it was the ordinary man who was right or wrong. He came out in a fury at the insult to his own little images or private prayers as if he had come out to fight with his own domestic poker or private carving knife. He was not armed with new weapons of wit and logic served round from the arsenal of an academy. There was any amount of wit and logic in the academies of the Middle Ages. But the typical leader of the crusades was not Abelard or Aquinas, but Peter the Hermit, who can hardly be called even a popular leader but rather a popular flag. And it was his army or rather his enormous rabble that first marched across the world to die for the deliverance of Jerusalem. Historians say that in the huge host of thousands there were only nine knights. To anyone who knows even a little of medieval war the fact seems astounding. It is indeed a long exploded fallacy to regard medievalism as identical with feudalism. There were countless democratic institutions such as the guilds. There was as many as twenty guilds in one small town. But it is really true that the military organization of the Middle Ages was almost entirely feudal. Indeed we might rather say that feudalism was the name of their military organization. That so vast a military mass should have attempted to move at all with only nine of the natural military leaders seems to me a prodigy of popular initiative. It is as if a parliament were elected at the next general election in which only two men could afford to read a daily newspaper. This mob marched against the military discipline of the Muslims and was massacred, or might I so mystically express it, martyred. Many of the great kings and knights who followed in their tracks did not so clearly deserve any halos for the simplicity and purity of their motives. The canonization of such a crowd might be impossible and would certainly be resisted in modern opinion, chiefly because they indulged their democratic violence on the way by killing various usurers, a course which naturally fills modern society with an anger verging on alarm. A perversity leads me to weep rather more over the may slaughtered peasants than over the few slaughtered usurers. But in any case the peasants certainly were not slaughtered in vain. The common conscious of all classes in a time when all had a common creed was aroused, and a new army followed of a very different type of skill and training, led by most of the ableist captains and some of the most chivalrous gentlemen of the age. For curiously enough the host contained more than one culture gentleman who was as simple a Christian as any peasant and as recklessly ready to be butchered or tortured for the mere name of Christ. It is a tag of the materialists that the truth about history rubs away the romance of history. It is dear to the modern mind because it is depressing. But it does not happen to be true. Nothing emerges more clearly from a study that is truly realistic than the curious fact that romantic people were really romantic. It is rather the historical novels that will lead a modern man vaguely to expect to find the leader of the new knights, Godfrey de Boulogne, to have been merely a brutal baron. The historical facts are all in favor of his having been much more like a knight of the round table. In fact he was a far better man than most of the knights of the round table, in whose characters, the fabulist, knowing that he was writing a fable, was tactful enough to introduce a larger edmixture of vice. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but often saintlier than fiction. For truth is real, while fiction is bound to be realistic. Curiously enough, Godfrey seems to have been heroic, even in those admirable accidents which are generally and perhaps rightly regarded as the trappings of fiction. Thus he was of a heroic stature, a handsome, red-bearded man of great personal strength and daring, and he was himself the first man over the wall of Jerusalem, like any boy-hero in a boy's adventure story. But he was also, the realist will be surprised to hear, a perfectly honest man, and a perfectly genuine practiser of the theoretical magnanimity of knighthood. Everything about him suggested it, from his first conversion, from the imperial to the papal and popular cause, to his great refusal of the kinghood of the city he had taken. I will not wear a crown of gold, where my master wore a crown of thorns. He was a just ruler, and the laws he made were full of the plainest public spirit. But even if we dismiss all that was written of him by Christian chroniclers, because they might be his friends, which would be a pathetic and exaggerated compliment to the harmonious unity of crusaders and of Christians, he would still remain sufficiently asoiled and crowned with the words of his enemies. For a serison chronicler wrote of him, with a fine simplicity, that if all truth and honor had otherwise withered off the earth, there would still remain enough of them so long as Duke Godfrey was alive. Aligned with Godfrey were Tancred the Italian, Raymond of Toulouse with the southern French, and Robert of Normandy, the adventurous son of the conqueror, with the Normans and the English. It would be an error, I think, and one tending to make the whole subsequent story a thing not so much misunderstood as unintelligible, to suppose that the whole crusading movement had been suddenly and unnaturally stiffened with the highest chivalric discipline. Unless I am much mistaken, a great mass of that army was still very much of a mob. It is probable, a priori, since the greatest popular movement was still profoundly popular. It is supported by a thousand things in the story of the campaign, the extraordinary emotionalism that made throngs of men weep and wail together, the importance of the demagogue, Peter the Hermit, in spite of his unmilitary character, and the wide differences between the designs of the leaders and the actions of the rank and file. It was a crowd of rude and simple men that cast themselves on the sacred dust at the first sight of the little mountain town which they had tramped for two thousand miles to see. Tankrids saw it first from the slope by the village of Bethlehem, which had opened its gates willingly to his hundred Italian knights. For Bethlehem, then, as now, was an island of Christendom in the Sea of Islam. Meanwhile, Godfrey came up the road from Jaffa, and crossing the mountain ridge saw also, with his living eyes, his vision of the world's desire. But the poorest men about him probably felt the same as he. All ranks knelt together in the dust, and the whole story is one wave of numberless and nameless men. It was a mob that had risen like a man for the faith. It was a mob that had truly been tortured like a man for the faith. It was already transfigured by pain as well as passion. Those that no war in those deserts, through the summer months, and with modern supplies and appliances of modern maps and calculations, know that it could only be described as a hell full of heroes. What it must have been to those little local serfs and peasants from the northern villages who had never dreamed in nightmares of such landscapes or such as sun, who knew not how men lived at all in such a furnace, and could neither guess the alleviations nor get them, is beyond the imagination of man. They arrived dying with thirst, dropping with weariness, lamenting the loss of the dead that rotted along the road. They arrived shriveled to rags or already raving with fever, and they did what they had come to do. Above all it is clear that they had the vices as well as the virtues of a mob. The shocking massacre in which they indulged in the sudden relaxation of success is quite obviously a massacre by a mob. It was all the more profoundly revolutionary because it must have been for the most part a French mob. It was of the same order as the massacre of September, and it is but a part of the same truth that the first crusade was as revolutionary as the French Revolution. It was of the same order as the massacre of St. Bartholomew, which was also a piece of purely popular fanaticism directed against what was also regarded as an anti-national aristocracy. It is practically self-evident that the Christian commanders were opposed to it and tried to stop it. Tancred promised their lives to the Moslems in the mosque, but the mob clearly disregarded him. Raymond of Toulouse himself saved those in the Tower of David and managed to send them safely with their property to Escalon. But revolution with all its evils, as well as its good, was loose and raging in the streets of the holy city. And in nothing do we see that spirit of revolution more clearly than in the sight of all those peasants and serfs and vassals in that one wild moment in revolt not only against the conquered lords of Islam, but even against the conquering lords of Christendom. The whole strain of the siege, indeed, had been one of high and even horrible excitement. Those who tell us today about the psychology of the crowd will agree that men who have so suffered and so succeeded are not normal, that their brains are in a dreadful balance which may turn either way. They entered the city at last in a mood in which they might all have become monks, and instead they all became murderers. A brilliant general who played a decisive part in our own recent Palestinian campaign told me, with the sort of grim humor, that he hardly wandered at the story, for he himself had entered Jerusalem in a sort of fury of disappointment. We went through such a hell to get there, and now it's spoiled for all of us. Such is the heavy irony that hangs over our human nature, making it enter the holy city as if it were the heavenly city, and more than any earthly city can be. The struggle, which led to the scaling of Jerusalem in the first Crusade, was something much wilder and more incalculable than anything that can be conceived in modern war. We can hardly wonder that the Crusading crowd saw the town in front of them as a sort of tower full of demons, and the hills around them as an enchanted and accursed land, for in one very real sense it really was so. For all the elements and expedience were alike on known qualities. All their enemy's methods were secrets sprung upon them. All their own methods were new things, made out of nothing. They wondered alike what would be done on the other side and what could be done on their own side. Every movement against them was a stab out of the darkness, and every movement they made was a leap in the dark. First on the one side we have Tancred trying to take the whole fortified city by climbing up a single slender ladder, as if a man tried to lasso the peak of the mountain. Then we have the flinging from the turrets of a strange and frightful fiery rain, as if water itself had caught fire. It was afterwards known as the Greek fire and was probably petroleum, but to those who had never seen or felt it before it may well have seemed the flaming oil of witchcraft. Then Godfrey and the wiser of the warriors set about to build wooden siege towers and found they had next to no wood to build them. There was scarcely anything in that rocky waste but the dwarf trees of Olive, a poetic fantasy woven about that war and after ages described them as hindered even in their woodcutting by the demons of that weird place. And indeed the fancy had an essential truth, for the very nature of the land fought against them, and each of those dwarf trees hard and hollow and twisted may well have seemed like a grinning goblin. It is said that they found timbers by accident in a cavern. They tore down the beams from ruined houses. At last they got into touch with some craftsmen from Genoa who went to work more successfully, skinning the cattle who had died in the heaps and covering the timbers. They built three high towers on rollers, and men and beasts dragged them heavily against the high towers of the city. The catapults of the city answered them and cataracts of devouring fire came down. The wooden towers swayed and tottered, and two of them suddenly stuck motionless and useless, and as the darkness fell a great flare must have told him that the third and last was in flames. All that night Godfrey was toiling to retrieve the disaster. He took down the whole tower from where it stood and raised it again on the high ground to the north of the city, which is now marked by the pine trees that grows outside Herod's gate. And all the time he toiled it was said sinister sorcerers sat upon the battlements working unknown marvels for the undoing of the labor of man. If the great knight had a touch of such symbolism on his own side, he might have seen it in his own strife with the solid timber, something of the craft that had surrounded the birth of his creed, and the sacred trade of the carpenter. And indeed the very pattern of all carpentry is cruciform, and there is something more than an accident in the allegory. The transverse position of the timber does indeed involve many of those mathematical that are analogous to moral truths, and almost every structural shape has the shadow of the mystic rude, as the three dimensions have the shadow of the trinity. Here is the true mystery of equality, since the longer beam might lengthen itself to infinity and never be nearer to the symbolic shape without the help of the shorter. Here is that war and wedding between two contrary forces resisting and supporting each other, the meeting-place of contraries which we, by a sort of pietistic pun, still call the crux of the question. Here is our angular and defiant answer to the self-devouring circle of Asia. It may be improbable, though it is far from impossible, for the age was philosophical enough, that a man like Godfrey thus extended the mystical through the metaphysical. But the writer of a real romance about him would be well within his rites in making him see the symbolism of his own tower, a tower rising above him through the clouds of night as if taking hold of the heavens or showing its network of beams black against the daybreak, scaling the skies and open to all the winds. A letter and a labyrinth repeating till it was lost in the twilight, the pattern of the sign of the cross. When the dawn was come, all those starving peasants may well have stood before the high and pregnant walls in the broad daylight of despair, even their nightmares during the night of unearthly necromancers looking down at them from the battlements and with signs and spells paralyzing all their potential toils. May well have been a sort of pessimistic consolation, anticipating and accounting for failure. The holy city had become for them a fortress full of fiends, when Godfrey de bouillon again set himself sword in hand upon the wooden tower and gave the order once more to drag it tottering toward the towers on either side of the post turn gate. So they crawled again across the fausts full of the slain, dragging their huge house of timber behind them, and all the blast and din of war broke again about their hits. A hail of bolts hammered such shields as covered them for canopy. Stones and rocks fell on them and crushed them like flies in the mire, and from the engines of the Greek fire all the torrents of their torment came down on them like red rivers of hell. For indeed the souls of those peasants must have been sickened with something of the topsy-turvydom felt by too many peasants of our own time under the frightful flying batteries of scientific war, a blasphemy of inverted battle in which hell itself has occupied heaven. Something of the vapors vomited by such cruel chemistry may have mingled with the dust of battle, and darkened such light has showed where shattering rocks were rending a roof of shields to men bowed and blinded as they are by such labor of dragging and such a hailstorm of death. They may have heard through all the racket of nameless noise, the high mannered cries of Muslim triumph rising shriller like a wind in shrill pipes and known little else of what was happening above or beyond them. It was most likely that they labored and strove in that lower darkness, not knowing that high over their heads and up above the cloud of battle the tower of timber and the tower of stone had touched and met in mid-heaven, and great Godfrey, alone and alive, had leapt upon the wall of Jerusalem. CHAPTER XI This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The New Jerusalem by G. K. Chesterton. CHAPTER XII THE FALL OF SHIVELRY On the back of this book is the name of the New Jerusalem, and on the first page of it a phrase about the necessity of going back to the old, even to find the new, as a man retraces his steps to a signpost. The common sense of that process is indeed most mysteriously misunderstood. Any suggestion that progress has at any time taken the wrong turning is always answered by the argument that men idealize the past and make a myth of the age of gold. If my progressive guide has led me into a morass or a man-trap by turning to the left by the red pillar box instead of to the right by the blue palings of the inn called the rising sun, my progressive guide always proceeds to soothe me by talking about the myth of an age of gold. He says I am idealizing the right turning. He says the blue palings are not so blue as they are painted. He says they are only blue with distance. He assures me there are spots on the sun, even on the rising sun. Sometimes he tells me I am wrong in my fixed conviction that the blue was of solid sapphires or the sun of solid gold. In short, he assures me I am wrong in supposing that the right turning was right in every possible respect, as if I had supposed anything of the sort. I wanted to go back to that particular place not because it was all my fancy paints it, or because it was the best place my fancy can paint, but because it was a many thousand times better place than the man-trap in which he and his like have landed me. But above all, I wanted to go back to it not because I know it was the right place, but because I think it was the right turning. And the right turning might possibly have led me to the right place, whereas the progressive guide has quite certainly led me to the wrong one. Now it is quite true that there is less general human testimony to the notion of a new Jerusalem in the future than to the notion of a golden age in the past. But neither of those ideas, whether or no they are illusions, are any answer to the question of a plain man in the plain position of this parable, a man who has to find some guidance in the past if he is to get any good in the future. What he positively knows in any case is the complete collapse of the present. Now that is the exact truth about the things so often rebuked as a romantic and unreal return of modern men to medieval things. They suppose they have taken the wrong turning because they know they are in the wrong place. To know that it is necessary not to idealize the medieval world, but merely to realize the modern world. It is not so much that they suppose the medieval world was above the average as that they feel sure that the modern world is below the average. They do not start either with the idea that man is meant to live in a new Jerusalem of pearl and sapphire in the future, or that man was meant to live in a picturesque and richly painted tavern of the past, but with a strong inward and personal persuasion that a man was not meant to live in a man-trap. So there is, and will be more and more a turn of total change in all our talk and writing about history. Everything in the past was praised if it had led up to the present and blamed if it would have led up to anything else. In short, everybody has been searching the past for the secret of our success. Very soon everybody may be searching the past for the secret of our failure. They may be talking in such terms as they use after a motor smash or a bankruptcy. Where was the blunder? They may be writing such books as generals ride after a military defeat. Whose was the fault? The failure will be assumed, even in being explained. For industrialism is no longer a vulgar success. On the contrary, it is now too tragic even to be vulgar. Under the cloud of doom, the modern city has taken on something of the dignity of Babel or Babylon. Whether we call it the nemesis of capitalism or the nightmare of Bolshevism makes no difference. The rich grumble as much as the poor. Everyone is discontented, and none more than those who are chiefly discontented with the discontent. About that discord we are in perfect harmony. About that disease we all think alike. Whatever we think of the diagnosis or the cure, by whatever process in the past we might have come to the right place. Practical facts in the present and future will prove more and more that we have come to the wrong place. And for many a premonition will grow more and more of a probability that we may or may not await another century or another world to see the New Jerusalem rebuilt and shining on our fields. But in the flesh we shall see Babylon fall. But there is another way in which that metaphor of the forked road will make the position plain. Medieval society was not the right place. It was only the right turning. It was only the right road or perhaps only the beginning of the right road. The medieval age was very far from being the age in which everything went right. It would be nearer the truth, I mean, to call it the age in which everything went wrong. It was the moment when things might have developed well and did develop badly. Or rather, to be yet more exact, it was the moment when they were developing well, and yet they were driven to develop badly. This was the history of all the medieval states and of none more than medieval Jerusalem. Maybe there were signs of some serious idea of making the model medieval state of this notion of Jerusalem as the New Jerusalem, of the utopian aspect of the adventure of the Latin kingdom. Something may be said in a moment. But meanwhile there was a more important part played by Jerusalem. I think in all that great progress and reaction which has left us the problem of modern Europe, and the suggestion of it is bound up with the former suggestion about the difference between the goal and the right road that might have led to it. It is bound up with that quality of the civilization in question, that it was potential rather than perfect, and there is no need to idealize it in order to regret it. This peculiar part played by Jerusalem I mention merely as a suggestion. I might almost say a suspicion. Not only how it is something of a guess, but I, for one, have found it a guide. Medievalism died, but it died young. It was at once energetic and incomplete when it died, or very shortly before it died. This is not a matter of sympathy or antipathy, but of appreciation of an interesting historic comparison with other historic cases. When the Roman Empire finally failed, we cannot of course say that it had done all it was meant to do, for that is dogmatism. We cannot even say it had done all that it might have done, for that is guesswork. But we can say that it had done certain definite things, and was conscious of having done them, that it had long and even literally rested on its laurels. But suppose that Rome had fallen when she had only half defeated Carthage, or when she had only half conquered Gaul, or even when the city was Christian, but most of the provinces still heathen. Then we should have said not merely that Rome had not done what she might have done, but that she had not done what she was actually doing, and that is very much the truth of the matter of the medieval civilization. It was not merely that the medievals left undone what they might have done, but that they left undone what they were doing. This potential promise is proved not only in their successes, but their failures. It is shown for instance in the very defects of their art. All the crafts of which Gothic architecture formed the framework were developed not only less than they should have been, but less than they would have been. There is no sort of reason why their sculptures should not have become as perfect as their architecture. There is no sort of reason why their sense of form should not have been as finished as their sense of color. A statue like that of the St. George of Donatello would have stood more appropriately under a Gothic than a classic arch. The niches were already made for the statues. The same thing is true, of course, not only about the state of the crafts, but about the status of the craftsmen. The best proof that the system of the guilds had an undeveloped good in it is that the most advanced modern men are now going back five hundred years to get the good out of it. The best proof that a rich house was brought to ruin is that our very pioneers are now digging in the ruins to find the riches. That the new guildsmen had a great deal that never belonged to the old guildsmen is not only a truth, but is part of the truth I maintain here. The new guildsmen add what the old guildsmen would have added if they had not died young. When we renew a frustrated thing, we do not renew the frustration. But if there are some things in the new that were not in the old, there were certainly some things in the old that are not yet visible in the new, such as individual humor in the handiwork. The point here, however, is not merely that the worker worked well, but that he was working better, not merely that his mind was free, but that it was growing freer. All this popular power and humor was increasing everywhere when something touched it and did withered away. The frost had struck it in the spring. Some people complain that the working man of our own day does not show an individual interest in his work, but it will be well to realize that they would be much more annoyed with him, if he did. The medieval workmen took so individual an interest in his work that he would call up devils entirely on his own account, carving them in corners according to his own taste and fancy. He would even reproduce the priests who were his patrons, and make them as ugly as devils. Having anti-clerical caricatures on the very seats and stalls of the clerics, if a modern householder on entering his own bathroom found that the plumber had twisted the taps into the images of two horned and grinning fiends, he would be faintly surprised. If the householder on returning it evening to his house found the door-knocker distorted into a repulsive likeness of himself, his surprise might even be tinged with disapproval. It may be just as well that the builders and bricklayers do not gratuitously attach gargoyles to our smaller residential villas. But well or ill it is certainly true that this feature of a flexible, popular fancy has never reappeared in any school of architecture or any state of society since the medieval decline. The great classical buildings of the Renaissance were swept as bare of it as any villa in Belham. But those who best appreciate this loss to popular art will be the first to agree that at its best it retained the touch of the barbaric as well as the popular. While we can admire these matters of the grotesque, we can admit that their work was sometimes unintentionally as well as intentionally grotesque. Some of the carvings did remain so rude that the angels were almost as ugly as the devils. But this is the very point upon which I would here insist. The mystery of why men who were so obviously only beginning should have so suddenly stopped, men with medieval sympathies, are sometimes accused, absurdly enough, of trying to prove that the medieval period was perfect. In truth, the whole case for it is that it was imperfect. It was imperfect as an unripe fruit or a growing child is imperfect. Indeed it was imperfect in that very particular fashion which most modern thinkers generally praise more than they ever praise maturity. It was something now much more popular than an age of perfection. It was an age of progress. It was perhaps the one real age of progress in all history. Men have seldom moved with such rapidity and such unity from barbarism to civilization as they did from the end of the dark ages to the times of the universities and the parliaments, the cathedrals and the gills. Up to a certain point we may say that everything at whatever stage of improvement was full of the promise of improvement. Then something began to go wrong, almost equally rapidly, and the glory of this great culture is not so much in what it did as in what it might have done. It recalls one of these typical medieval speculations full of the very fantasy of free will in which the schoolmen tried to fancy the fate of every herb or animal if Adam had not eaten the apple. It remains, in a cant historical phrase, one of the great might have beens of history. I have said that it died young, but perhaps it would be truer to say that it suddenly grew old. It got free and many of its great champions in Jerusalem. It was overtaken in the prime of life by a mysterious malady. The more a man reads of history the less easy he will find it to explain that secret and rapid decay of medieval civilization from within. Only a few generations separated the world that worshiped St. Francis from the world that burned Joan of Arc. One would think there might be no more than a date and a number between the white mystery of Louis IX and the black mystery of Louis XI. This is the very real historical mystery. The more realistic is our study of medieval things the more puzzled we shall be about the peculiar creeping paralysis which affected things so virile and so full of hope. There was a growth of moral morbidity as well as social inefficiency, especially in the governing classes. Where even to the end the guildsmen and the peasants remained much more vigorous. How it ended we all know. Personally I should say that they got the reformation and deserved it, but it matters nothing to the truth here, whether the reformation was just a revolt and revenge or an unjust culmination and conquest. It is common ground to Catholics and Protestants of intelligence that evils preceded and produced the sism, and that evils were produced by it and have pursued it down to our own day. We know it, if only in one example, that the sism began the Thirty Years' War, and the Thirty Years' War began the Seven Years' War, and the Seven Years' War began the Great War, which has passed like a pestilence through our own homes. After the sism Prussia could relapse into heathenry, and erect an ethical system external to the whole culture of Christendom. But it can still be reasonably asked what beget the sism, and it can still be reasonably answered, something that went wrong with medievalism. But what was it that went wrong? When I looked for the last time on the Towers of Zion, I had a fixed fancy that I knew what it was. It is the thing that cannot be proved or disproved. It must sound merely an ignorant guess, but I believe myself that it died of disappointment. I believe the whole medieval society failed because the heart went out of it with the loss of Jerusalem. Let it be observed that I do not say the loss of the war or even the crusade, for the war against Islam was not lost. The Moslem was overthrown in the real battlefield which was Spain. He was menaced in Africa. His imperial power was already stricken and beginning slowly to decline. I do not mean the political calculations about a Mediterranean war. I do not even mean the papal conceptions about the Holy War. I mean the purely popular picture of the Holy City. For while the aristocratic thing was a view, the vulgar thing was a vision. Something with which all stories stop. Something where the rainbow ends. Something over the hills and far away. In Spain they had been victorious, but their castle was not even a castle in Spain. It was a castle east of the sun and west of the moon, and the fairy prince could find it no more. Indeed that idle image out of the nursery books fits it very exactly, for its mystery was and is standing in the middle, as they say, in the very center of the earth. It is east of the sun of Europe, which fills the world with a daylight of sanity, and ripens real and growing things. It is west of the moon of Asia, mysterious and archaic, with its cold volcanoes, silver mirror for poets, and a most fatal magnet for lunatics. Anyhow, the fall of Jerusalem, and in that sense the failure of the Crusades, had a widespread effect, as I should myself suggest, for the reason I have myself suggested. Because it had been a popular movement it was a popular disappointment, and because it had been a popular movement its ideal was an image, a particular picture in the imagination. For poor men are almost always particularists, and nobody has ever seen such a thing as a mob of pantheists. I have seen in some of that lost literature of the old guilds, which is now everywhere coming to light, a list of the stage properties required for some village play. One of those popular plays acted by the medieval trades unions, for which the guild of the shipwrights would build Noah's Ark, or the guild of the barbers, provide golden wigs for the halos of the twelve apostles. The list of those crude pieces of stage furniture had a curious color of poetry about it, like the impromptu apparatus of a nursery charade, a cloud, an idol, with a club, and notably among the rest the walls and towers of Jerusalem. I can imagine them patiently painted and gilded as a special feature, like the two tubs of Mr. Vincent Crummel's, but I can also imagine that towards the end of the Middle Ages the master of the rebels might begin to look at those towers of wood and pasteboard with a sort of paint, and perhaps put them away in a corner as a child-wiltire of a toy, especially if it is associated with a disappointment or a dismal misunderstanding. There is noticeable in some of the later popular poems a disposition to sulk about the Crusades. But though the popular feeling had been largely poetical, the same thing did in its degree occur in the political realm that was purely practical. The Muslim had been checked, but he had not been checked enough. The whole story of what was called the Eastern Question and the three quarters of the wars of the modern world were due to the fact that he was not checked enough. The only thing to do with unconquerable things is to conquer them. That alone will cure them of invincibility or what is worse their own vision of invincibility. That was the conviction of those of us who would not accept what we considered a premature peace with Prussia. That is why we would not listen either to the Tory pro-Germanism of Lord Lansdowne or the Socialist pro-Germanism of Mr. MacDonald. If a lunatic believes in his luck so fixedly as to feel sure he cannot be caught, he will not only believe in it still, but believe in it more and more until the actual instant when he is caught. The longer the chase, the more certain he will be of escaping. The more narrow the escapes, the more certain will be the escape. And indeed if he does escape, it will seem a miracle and almost the divine intervention not only to the pursued but to the pursuers. The evil thing will chiefly appear unconquerable to those who try to conquer it. It will seem after all to have a secret success, and those who failed against it will hide in their hearts a secret failure. It was that secret failure, I fancy, that slowly withered from within the high hopes of the Middle Ages. Christianity and chivalry had measured their force against Mahound, and Mahound had not fallen. The shadow of his horned helmet, the crest of the Crescent, to lay across their sunnier lands, the horns of Hatton, the streams of life that flowed to guilds and schools and orders of knighthood and brotherhoods of friars, were strangely changed and chilled. So if the peace had left Prussianism secure even in Prussia, I believe that all the liberal ideas of the Lattons, and all the liberties of the English, and the whole theory of a democratic experiment in America, would have begun to die of a deep and even subconscious despair. A vote, a jury, a newspaper, would not be as they are, things of which it is hard to make the right use or of any use. They would be things of which nobody would even try to make any use. A vote would actually look like a vassal's cry of horror. A jury would look like a joust. Many would know more read headlines than blaze and heraldic coats. For these medieval things looked dead and dusty because of a defeat, which was nonetheless a defeat, because it was more than half a victory. A curious cloud of confusion rests on the details of that defeat. The Christian captains who acted in it were certainly men on a different moral level from the good Duke Godfrey. Their characters were by comparison mixed and even mysterious. Perhaps the two determining personalities were Raymond of Tripoli, a skillful soldier whom his enemies seemed to have accused of being much too skillful a diplomatist, and Reynard of Châtelon, a violent adventurer whom his enemies seemed to have accused of being little better than abandoned. And it is the irony of the incident that Raymond got into trouble for making a dubious peace with the Saracens, while Reynard got into trouble by making an equally dubious war on the Saracens. Reynard exacted from the Muslim travels on a certain road what he regarded as a sort of feudal toll or tax, and they regarded as a brigand ransom. And when they did not pay, he attacked them. This was regarded as a breach of the truce. But probably it would have been easier to regard Reynard as waging the war of a robber, if many had not regarded Raymond as having made the truce of the traitor. Maybe Raymond was not a traitor, since the military advice he gave to the very instant of catastrophe was entirely loyal and sound, and worthy of so wise a veteran. And very likely Reynard was not merely a robber, especially in his own eyes, and there seems to be a much better case for him than many modern writers allow. But the very fact of such charges being bandied among the faction, shows a certain fall from the first days under the headship of the House of Bouillon. No slanderer ever suggested that Godfrey was a traitor. No enemy ever asserted that Godfrey was only a thief. It is fairly clear that there had been a degeneration. But most people hardly realized sufficiently that there had been a very great thing from which to degenerate. The first crusades had really had some notion of Jerusalem as the new Jerusalem. I mean that they had really had a vision of the place not being only a promised land but a utopia, or even an earthly paradise. The outstanding fact and feature which the seldom seized is this, that the social experiments in Palestine was rather in advance of the social experiments of the rest of Christendom. Having to begin at the beginning they really began with what they considered the best ideas of their time, like any group of socialists founding an ideal commonwealth in a modern colony. A specialist on this period, Colonel Condor of the Palestine exploration, has written that the core of the code was founded on the recommendations of Godfrey himself in his Letters of the Sepulcher, and he observes concerning it. The basis of these laws was found in Justinian's code, and they presented features as yet quite unknown in Europe, especially in their careful provision of justice for the bourgeois and the peasant, and for the trading communes whose fleets were so necessary to the king. Not only were free men judged by juries of their equals, but the same applied to those who were technically serfs and actually aborigines. The original arrangements of the native court seemed to me singularly liberal, even by modern standards of the treatment of natives, that in many such medieval codes citizens were still called serfs is no more final than the fact that in many modern capitalist newspapers serfs are still called citizens. The whole point about the villain was that he was a tenant, at least as prominent as a peasant. He went with the land, and there are a good many hopeless tramps starving in streets or sleeping in ditches who might not be sorry if they could go with a little land. It would not be very much worse than homelessness and hunger to go with a good kitchen garden, of which you could always eat most of the beans and turnips, or to go with a good corn field, of which you could take a considerable portion of the corn. There has been many a modern man who would have been none the worse for going about burdened with such a green island, or dragging the change of such a tangle of green living things. As a fact, of course, this system throughout Christendom was already evolving rapidly into a pure peasant proprietorship, and it will be long before industrialism evolves by itself into anything so equal or so free. Above all, there appears notably that universal mark of the medieval movement, the voluntary liberation of slaves. But we may willingly allow that something of the earlier success of all this was due to the personal qualities of the first knights fresh from the West, and especially to the personal justice and moderation of Godfrey and some of his immediate kindred. Godfrey died young. His successors had mostly short periods of power, largely through the prevalence of malaria in the absence of medicine. Royal marriages with the more oriental tradition of the Armenian princes brought in new elements of luxury and cynicism. And by the time of the disputed truce of Raymond of Tripoli the crown had descended to a man named Guy de Luzien, who seems to have been regarded as a somewhat unsatisfactory character. He had quarreled with Raymond, who was ruler of Galilee, and a curious and rather incomprehensible concession made by the latter, that the Saracens should ride in arms but in peace round his land, led to alleged Muslim insults to Nazareth, and the outbreak of the furious Templar, Gerard Bidford, of which mention has been made already. But the most serious threat to them and their new Jerusalem was the emergence among the Muslims of a man of military genius, and the fact that all that land lay now under the shadow of the ambition and ardor of Saladin. With the breach of the truce, or even the tale of it, the common danger of Christians was apparent, and Raymond of Tripoli repaired to the royal headquarters to consult with his late enemy the king. But he seems to have been almost openly treated as a traitor. Gerard of Bidford, the fanatic who was the grand master of the Templars, forced the king's hand against the advice of the wiser soldier, who had pointed out the peril of perishing of thirst in the waterless wastes between them and the enemy. Into those wastes they advanced, and they were already weary and unfit for warfare by the time they came in sight of the strange hills that will be remembered for ever under the name of the horns of Hatin. On those hills a few hours later, the last nights of an army of which half had fallen, gathered in a final defiance and despair round the relic they carried in their midst, a fragment of the true cross. In that hour fell, as I have fancied, more hopes than they themselves could number, and the glory departed from the Middle Ages. There fell with them all that knew Jerusalem which was the symbol of a new world, all those great and growing promises and possibilities of Christendom of which this vision was the center, all that justice for the bourgeois and the peasant and for the trading communes, all the guilds that gained their charters by fighting for the cross, all the hopes of a happier transformation of the Roman law wedded to charity and to chivalry. There was the first slip and the great swerving of our fate, and in that wilderness we lost all the things we should have loved that shall need so long a labor to find again. The end of Tripoli had hewn his way through the enemy and ridden away to Tyre. The king with a few of the remaining nobles, including Renaud de Châtelon, were brought before Saladin in his tent. There occurred a scene, strangely typical of the mingled strains in the creed, or the culture of the triumph on that day, the stately eastern courtesy and hospitality, the wild eastern hatred and self-will. Saladin welcomed the king and gracefully gave him a cup of sherbert, which he passed to Renaud. It is thou and not I who has given him the drink, said the serocin, preserving the precise letter, the punctilio of hospitality. Then he suddenly flung himself, raving and reviling upon Renaud de Châtelon, and killed the prisoner with his own hands. Outside two hundred hospitalers and Templars were beheaded on the field of battle. By one account I have read, because Saladin disliked them, and by another, because they were Christian priests. There is a strong bias against the Christians and in favor of the Muslims, and the Jews, in most of the Victorian historical works, especially historical novels, and most people of modern or rather of very recent times got all their notions of history from dipping into historical novels. In those romances the Jew is always the oppressed, where in reality he was often the oppressor. In those romances the Arab is always credited with Oriental dignity and courtesy, and never with Oriental crookedness and cruelty. The same injustice is introduced into history, which by means of selection and omission can be made as fictitious as any fiction. Twenty historians mention the way in which the maddened Christian mob murdered the Muslims after the capture of Jerusalem, for one who mentions that the Muslim commander commanded in a cold blooded murder of some two hundred of his most famous and valiant enemies after the victory of Etin. The former cannot be shown to have been the act of Tankred, while the latter was quite certainly the act of Saladin, yet Tankred is described as at best a doubtful character, while Saladin is represented as a Bayard without fear or blame. Both of them doubtless were ordinary, faulty, fighting men. But they are not judged by an equal balance. Yet may seem a paradox that there should be this prejudice in Western history in favor of Eastern heroes. But the cause is clear enough. It is the remains of the revolt among many Europeans against their own old religious organization, which naturally made them hunt through all ages for its crimes and its victims. It was natural that Voltaire should sympathize more with the Brahmin he had never seen than with a Jesuit with whom he was engaged in a violent controversy, and should similarly feel more dislike of a Catholic who was his enemy than of a Muslim who was the enemy of his enemy. In this atmosphere of natural and even pardonable prejudice arose the habit of contrasting the intolerance of the Crusaders with the toleration shown by the Muslims. Now as there are two sides to everything, it would undoubtedly be quite possible to tell the tale of the Crusades correctly enough in detail, and in such a way as entirely to justify the Muslims and condemn the Crusaders. But any such record of the Muslim case would have very little to do with any questions of tolerance or intolerance, or any modern ideas about religious liberty and equality. As the modern world does not know what it means itself by religious liberty and equality, as the moderns have not thought out any logical theory of toleration at all, for their vague generalizations can always be upset by twenty tests from thugs to Christian science. It would obviously be unreasonable to expect the moderns to understand the much clearer philosophy of the Muslims. But some rough suggestion of what was really involved may be found convenient in this case. Islam was not originally a movement directed against Christianity at all. It did not face westwards, so to speak. It faced eastwards toward the idolatries of Asia. But Muhammad believed that these idols could be fought more successfully with a simpler kind of creed. One might almost say with a simpler kind of Christianity. For he included many things which we in the West commonly suppose not only to be peculiar to Christianity, but to be peculiar to Catholicism. Many things have been rejected by Protestantism that are not rejected by Muhammadism. Thus the Muslims believe in purgatory, and they give at least a sort of dignity to the mother of Christ. About such things as these they have little of the bitterness that rankles in the Jews, and is sometimes to be hideously vitriolic. While I was in Palestine a distinguished Muslim said to a Christian resident, we also as well as you honor the mother of Christ, never do we speak of her, but we call her the Lady Miriam. I dare not tell you what the Jews call her. The real mistake of the Muslims is something much more modern in its application than any particular or passing persecution of Christians as such. It lay in the very fact that they did think they had a simpler and saner sort of Christianity, as do many modern Christians. They thought he could be made universal merely by being made uninteresting. Now a man preaching what he thinks is a platitude is far more intolerant than a man preaching what he admits is a paradox. It was exactly because it seemed self-evident to Muslims as to Bolshevists that their simple creed was suited to everybody, that they wished in that particular sweeping fashion to impose it on everybody. It was because Islam was broad that Muslims were narrow, and because it was not a hard religion it was a heavy rule. Because it was without a self-correcting complexity it allowed of those simple and masculine but mostly rather dangerous appetites that show themselves in a chieftain or a Lord. Because it had the simplest sort of religion, monotheism, so it had the simplest sort of government, monarchy. There was exactly the same direct spirit in its despotism as in its deism. The code, the common law, the give and take of charters and chivalric vows did not grow in that golden desert. The great sun was in the sky and the great saladin was in his tent, and he must be obeyed unless he were assassinated. Those who complain of our creeds as elaborate often forget that the elaborate Western creeds have produced the elaborate Western constitutions, and that they are elaborate because they are emancipated. And the real moral of the relations of the two great religions is something much more subtle and sincere than any mere atrocity tales against Turks. It is the same as the moral of the Christian refusal of a pagan pantheon in which Christ should rank with Amon and Apollo. Twice the Christian church refused what seemed like a handsome offer of a large, latitudinarian sort, once to include Christ as a god, and once to include him as a prophet, once by the admission of all idols, and once by the abandonment of all idols. Twice the church took the risk, and twice the church survived alone and succeeded alone, filling the world with her own children and leaving her rivals in a desert where the idols were dead and the iconoclasts were dying. But all this history has been hidden by a prejudice more general than the particular case of seresans and crusaders. The modern, or rather the Victorian prejudice against crusaders is positive and not relative, and it would still desire to condemn Tancred if he could not acquit Saladin. Indeed it is a prejudice not so much against crusaders as against Christians. It will not give to these heroes of religious war the fair measure it gives to the heroes of ordinary, patriotic, and imperial war. There never was a nobler hero than Nelson, or one more national or more normal. Yet Nelson quite certainly did do, or Tancred almost certainly did not do, break his own word by giving up his own brave enemies to execution. If the cause of Nelson in other times comes to be treated as the creed of Tancred has often in recent times been treated, this incident alone will be held sufficient to prove not only that Nelson was a liar and a scoundrel, but that he did not love England at all, did not love Lady Hamilton at all, that he sailed in English ships only to pocket the prize money of friendships, and would as willingly have sailed in friendships for the sake of prize money of English ships. That is the sort of dull dust of gold that has been shaken like the drifting dust of the desert over the swords and relics, the crosses and the clasped hands of the men who marched to Jerusalem, or died at Hatin. In these medieval pilgrims every inconsistency is a hypocrisy, while in the more modern patriots even an infamy is only an inconsistency. I have rounded off the story here with the ruin at Hatin because the whole reaction against the pilgrimage had its origin there, and because it was this at least that finally lost Jerusalem. There in Palestine, to say nothing of Africa and Spain, splendid counterstrokes were still being delivered from the West, not the least being the splendid rescue by Richard of England. But I still think that with the mere name of that tiny town upon the hills, the note of the whole human revolution has been struck, was changed, and was silent. All the other names were only the names of eastern towns, but that was nearer to a man than his neighbors, a village inside his village, a house inside his house. There is a hill above Bethlehem of a strange shape, with a flat top, which makes it look oddly like an island, habitable though uninhabited. When all Moab heaves about it and beyond it as with the curves and colors of a sea, its stability suggests in some strange fashion what may often be felt in these lands with the longest record of culture, that there may be not only a civilization, but even a chivalry older than history. Perhaps the table land with its round top has a romantic reminiscence of a round table. Perhaps it is only a fantastic effect of evening, for it is felt most when the low skies are swimming with the colors of sunset, and in the shadows the shattered rocks about its base take on the shapes of titanic paladins fighting and falling around it. I only know that the mere shape of the hill and vista of the landscape suggested such visions, and it was only afterwards that I heard the local legend, which says it is here that some of the Christian knights made their last stand after they lost Jerusalem, and which names this height the mountain of the Latins. They fell, and the ages rolled on them, the rocks of scorn. They were buried in jests and buffooneries. As the Renaissance expanded into the rationalism of recent centuries, nothing seemed so ridiculous as to butcher and bleed in a distant desert, not only for a tomb, but an empty tomb. The last legend of them withered under the wit of Cervantes, though he himself had fought in the last crusaded Lepanto. They were kicked about like dead donkeys by the cool vivacity of Voltaire, who went off very symbolically to dance attendance on the new-drill sergeant of the Prussians. They were dissected like strange beasts by the serene disgust of Gibbon, more serene than the similar horror with which he regarded the similar violence of the French Revolution. By our own time even the flippancy has become a plattitude. They have long been the butt of every penny-aligner who can talk of a helmet as a tin pot, of every caricaturist on a comic paper who can draw a fat man falling off a bucking horse, of every pushing professional politician who can talk about the superstitions of the Middle Ages. Great men and small have agreed to condemn them. They were renounced by the children and refuted by their biographers. They were exposed. They were exploded. They were ridiculed, and they were right. They were proved wrong, and they were right. They were judged finally and forgotten, and they were right. Centuries after their fall, the full experience and development of political discovery has shown beyond question that they were right. For there is a very simple test of the truth of that very thing which was dismissed as a dream of the ages of faith. We have been forced to turn into a fact in the ages of fact. It is now more certain than it ever was before that Europe must rescue some lordship or overlordship of those old Roman provinces. Whether it is wise for England alone to claim Palestine, whether it would be better if the Entente could do so, I think a serious question. And in some form they are reverting for the Roman Empire. Every opportunity has been given for any other Empire that could be its equal, and especially for the great dream of a mission for Imperial Islam. If ever a human being had a run for his money, it was the Sultan of the Moslems riding on his Arab steed. His empire expanded over beyond the Greek Empire of Byzantium. A last charge of the chivalry of Poland barely stopped it at the very gates of Vienna. He was free to unfold everything that was in him, and he unfolded the death that was in him. He reigned and could not rule. He was successful and did not succeed. His baffled and retreating enemies left him standing and he could not stand. He fell finally with that other half heathen power in the north, with which he had made an alliance against the remains of Roman and Byzantium culture. He fell because barbarism cannot stand. Because even when it succeeds it rather falls on its foes and crushes them. And after all these things, after all these ages, with a wearier philosophy, with a heavier heart, we have been forced to do again the very thing that the Crusaders were derided for doing. What Western men fail to do for the faith. Other Western men have been forced to do even without the faith. The sons of Tancred are again in Tripoli. The heirs of Raman are again in Syria. And men from the Midlands or the Northumbrian towns went again through a furnace of thirst and fever and furious fighting to gain the same water-courses and invest the same cities as of old. They trod the hills of Galilee and the horns of Hettin through no shadow on their souls. They crossed dark and disastrous fields whose fame has been hidden from them and avenged the fathers they had forgotten. And the most cynical of modern diplomatists, making their settlement by the most skeptical of modern philosophies, can find no practical or even temporary solution for this sacred land except to bring it again under the crown of Cordelion and the cross of St. George. There came in through the crooked entry beside the great gap in the wall, a tall soldier, dismounting and walking and wearing only the dust-hued habit of modern war. There went no trumpet before him. Where did he enter by the Golden Gate? But the silence of the deserts was full of a phantom acclamation, as when from far away a wind brings in a whisper the cheering of many thousand men. For in that hour a long lost cry found fulfillment, and something counted irrational, returned in the reason of things, and at last even the wise understood, and at last even the learned were enlightened on a need truly and indeed international, which a mob in a darker age had known by the light of nature something that could be denied and delayed and evaded, but not escaped forever.