re of the Shepherd and the King.
In the West the world not only prolonged its life but recovered
its youth. That is the meaning of the movement I have described
as the awakening of the West and the resurrection of Rome.
And the whole point of that movement, as I propose to suggest,
was that it was a popular movement. It had returned with exactly
that strange and simple energy that belongs to the story of Bethlehem.
Not in vain had Constantine come clad in purple to look down into
that dark cave at his feet; nor did the star mislead him when it seemed
to end in the entrails of the earth. The men who followed him passed on,
as it were, through the low and vaulted tunnel of the Dark Ages;
but they had found the way, and the only way, out of that world
of death, and their journey ended in the land of the living.
They came out into a world more wonderful than the eyes of men
have looked on before or after; they heard the hammers of hundreds
of happy craftsmen working for once according to their own will,
and saw St. Francis walking with his halo a cloud of birds.

CHAPTER XI

THE MEANING OF THE CRUSADE

There are three examples of Western work on the great eastern slope
of the Mount of Olives; and they form a sort of triangle illustrating
the truth 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 site 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 grey 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 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 grey with fear from t