ther at eleven o'clock, and all coming back
together to lunch. He does not picture the peculiar impression
he would gain on the spot; of chance people going in and out of
the church all day, sometimes for quite short periods, as if it
were a sort of sacred inn. Or suppose a man knowing only English
beer-shops hears for the first time of a German beer-garden,
he probably does not imagine the slow ritual of the place.
He does not know that unless the drinker positively slams down the top
of his beer-mug with a resounding noise and a decisive gesture,
beer will go on flowing into it as from a natural fountain;
the drinking of beer being regarded as the normal state of man,
and the cessation of it a decisive and even dramatic departure.
I do not give this example in contempt; heaven forbid.
I have had so much to say of the inhuman side of Prussianised Germany
that I am glad to be able to pay a passing tribute to those more
generous German traditions which we hope may revive and make Germany
once more a part of Christendom. I merely give it as an instance
of the way in which things we have all heard of, like church-going
or beer-drinking, in foreign lands, mean much more, and something
much more special, than we should infer from our own land.
Now this is true of a phrase we have all heard of deserted cities
or temples in the Near East: "The Bedouins camp in the ruins."
When I have read a hundred times that Arabs camp in some deserted town
or temple near the Nile or the Euphrates, I always thought of gipsies
near some place like Stonehenge. They would make their own rude shelter
near the stones, perhaps sheltering behind them to light a fire;
and for the rest, generations of gipsies might camp there without
making much difference. The thing I saw more than once in Egypt
and Palestine was much more curious. It was as if the gipsies set
to work to refurnish Stonehenge and make it a commodious residence.
It was as if they spread a sort of giant umbrella over the circle
of stones, and elaborately hung curtains between them, so as to
turn the old Druid temple into a sort of patchwork pavilion.
In one sense there is much more vandalism, and in another sense
much more practicality; but it is a practicality that always stops
short of the true creative independence of going off and building
a house of their own. That is the attitude of the Arab; and it runs
through all his history. Noble as is his masterpiece of the Mosque