one of the things that set a modern man wondering is the nature of the survivor of our time.
it is customary to say that all human things decay and end; and if you will take a period long enough of course it is true, for at last the world itself shall dissolve. but when men point to dead empires, as egypt or assyria are dead, or when they point to a fossilised civilisation, as it seems, according to travellers, that certain civilisations of the east are fossilised, or when they point to little broken cities where once were famous towns, one is tempted to remember that to all these there is an exceptional glorious sort which is ourselves. atlantic europe, the europe that was made by the christian faith and in the first four centuries of our[pg 254] era, lives on from change to change in a most marvellous way, and for now two thousand years has not seemed capable of decline. you have in the history of it resurrection after resurrection, and through all those rapid and fantastic developments, transformations far more rapid and far more fantastic than any other of which we have record, a sort of inner fixity of type remains, like the individual soul of the man which makes him always himself in spite of accident and in spite of the process of age; only, europe differs from such metaphor in this, that it is like some man not subject, it would seem, to mortality.
this thought to which i perpetually return, occurred to me as i handled a book on paris, the illustrations of which were impressions gathered by a japanese artist. such a contrast will call up in the minds of many the contrast between something very old and something very new. a reader might say as he glanced at this book: "here is one of the most ancient things we have, the oriental mind, and it is looking at[pg 255] one of the freshest and most modern things we have, modern paris."
i confess that to me the contrast is of another kind. i should say: "here is something which is, so far as its inner force goes, immovable, the oriental mind; and this is how it looks at the most mobile thing on earth, the heart of gaul—yet the mobile thing has a history almost as long as, and far more full than, the immobile thing."
upon a central page of this book i found a really splendid bit of drawing. it is an impression of the statue of the republic under a cold dawn. now when one thinks what that statue means, what portion of the stoical philosophy re-arisen after so many centuries it embodies, what furious combats have raged round that idea: i mean combats, not debates: pain, not rhetoric; men dying in great numbers and desiring to kill others as they died. when one considers that statue but the other day, with the raging mob of workmen round it, and when one suddenly remembers that the whole thing is[pg 256] after all only of the last hundred years—what a multiplicity of life this chief of our european cities possesses in one's eyes!
the admirable pictures in this book are drawn as nearly in the european manner as one could expect, but the feeling is an unchanging feeling which we know in eastern things. the mind is like deep and level water, never stirred by wind: a big lake in a crater of the hills. but the thing drawn is as moving and as living as the air.
i wonder whether this artist, as he stood and drew, felt as a european feels when he stands and draws in any one of our immemorial sites: by the pool of london, or at the top of the rue st. jacques, or in the place of the martyrdom at toulouse, or looking at the most ancient yellow dusts of toledo from over the tumbling strength of the tagus? he may have felt it ... perhaps ... for all his work, even the little introduction that he has written shows that astonishing adaptability and exceedingly rapid intelligence which are the marks of[pg 257] the japanese to-day. but if he felt it he must have felt it by education. for us it is in our blood. we stand upon those sites and we feel ourself in and part of a stream of life that seems almost incapable of ending. and that brings me back to where i began, how much longer will our civilisation endure?
will it end? it has many enemies, most of them unconscious, has modern europe.
it has men within it who imagine that the correction of some large abuse and the withdrawal of some considerable part of its fabric in the correction of that abuse, is a matter concerning only their one generation. these men visibly put in peril the balance of that civilisation by their very enthusiasm.
it has a lesser number of other enemies within itself; enemies more dangerous, who do believe that some quite new thing wholly alien to the soul of europe can be imposed upon that soul. these men are always for anarchy; they delight in emphasising all that seems to diminish the responsibility and the freedom of citizens, and[pg 258] it is their pleasure to accelerate every tendency which may destroy, from whatever side, our permanent solution of domestic and of natural things: families, properties, armies.
the common faith which was, as it were, the cement of our civilisation has been hit so hard that some do ask themselves openly the question that was only whispered some little time ago—whether the cement still holds. it is quite certain that if that last symbol and reality disintegrates, if the catholic church leaves it, europe has come to an end.
but these questions are not yet to be met by any reply. and when i ask myself those questions, and i always do when i see the seine going by the walls that were cæsar's parleying ground with the chiefs, dionysius's prison, julian's office, dagobert's palace, and which have been subject to everything from charlemagne to the bourbons, and which have (within the memory of men whom i myself have known) ended the monarchy and seen passing by a wholly new society—when i ask myself those[pg 259] questions, i answer less and less with every year.
time was, in the university, say twenty years ago, one would have said: "it is all over. everything that can destroy us has triumphed." time was, say ten years ago, in the heat of a particular struggle which raged all over the west, one could have said with the enthusiasm of the fight, that continuity would win. but to-day, whether because one has accumulated knowledge or because things are really more confused, it is difficult to reply.
* * * * *
a man with our knowledge and our experience of what europe has been and is, standing in the grey and decayed roman city of the fifth century, and watching the little barbarian troop riding into lutetia, might have said that a gradual darkness would swallow us all, especially since he knew that just beyond the narrow seas in eastern britain a dense pall then covered the corpse of the roman civilisation.
a man working on the tour st. jacques, the[pg 260] last of the gothic, might have seen nothing but anarchy and the end of all good work in the change that was surging round him: the huguenots, the new splendour, the cruelty and the making of lies.
certainly those who were present in paris before the 10th of august,'92, thought an end had come, and believed the revolution to be a most unfruitful and tempestuous death; imagining europe to have no hope but in the possible extinction of the flame.
all three judgments would have been wrong. and when one takes that typical paris again, and handles it and looks at it and thinks of it as the example and the symbol of all our time; just as one is beginning to say "the thing is dying," the memory of similar deaths that were not deaths in the past returns to one and one must be silent.
never was europe less conscious of herself, never did she more freely admit the forces that destroy, than she admits them to-day. never was evil more insolently or more glaringly in[pg 261] power; never had it less fear of chastisement than in the whirlwind of our time. if that whirlwind is mechanical, and if this vast anarchic commerce, these blaring papers, these sudden fortunes, these frequent and unparalleled huge wars, are the breaking up of all that once made europe, then the answer to the question is plain: but it may be that these are things not mechanical but organic: seeds surviving in the ruin which will grow up into living forms. we shall see.
