Revering the dead and camping on their graves, elaborating
exquisite monuments only to abandon and defile them,
venerating scholarship and wisdom and living in ignorance
and grossness, these gifted races, perpetually struggling
to reach some higher level of culture from which they
have always been swept down by a fresh wave of barbarism,
are still only a people in the making.
It may be that the political stability which France
is helping them to acquire will at last give their
higher qualities time for fruition; and when one looks
at the mausoleum of Marrakech and the Medersas of Fez
one feels that, were the experiment made on artistic
grounds alone, it would yet be well worth making.
HAREMS AND CEREMONIES
THE CROWD IN THE STREET
To occidental travellers the most vivid impression
produced by a first contact with the Near East is
the surprise of being in a country where the human
element increases instead of diminishing the delight
of the eye.
After all, then, the intimate harmony between nature
and architecture and the human body that is revealed
in Greek art was not an artist’s counsel of
perfection but an honest rendering of reality:
there were, there still are, privileged scenes where
the fall of a green-grocer’s draperies or a
milkman’s cloak or a beggar’s rags are
part of the composition, distinctly related to it
in line and colour, and where the natural unstudied
attitudes of the human body are correspondingly harmonious,
however humdrum the acts it is engaged in. The
discovery, to the traveller returning from the East,
robs the most romantic scenes of western Europe of
half their charm: in the Piazza of San Marco,
in the market-place of Siena, where at least the robes
of the Procurators or the gay tights of Pinturicchio’s
striplings once justified man’s presence among
his works, one can see, at first, only the outrage
inflicted on beauty by the “plentiful strutting
manikins” of the modern world.
Moroccan crowds are always a feast to the eye.
The instinct of skilful drapery, the sense of colour
(subdued by custom, but breaking out in subtle glimpses
under the universal ashy tints) make the humblest
assemblage of donkey-men and water-carriers an ever-renewed
delight. But it is only on rare occasions, and
in the court ceremonies to which so few foreigners
have had access, that the hidden sumptuousness of the
native life is revealed. Even then, the term sumptuousness
may seem ill-chosen, since the nomadic nature of African
life persists in spite of palaces and chamberlains
and all the elaborate ritual of the Makhzen, and the
most pompous rites are likely to end in a dusty gallop
of wild tribesmen, and the most princely processions
to tail off in a string of half-naked urchins riding
bareback on donkeys.
As in all Oriental countries, the contact between
prince and beggar, vizier and serf is disconcertingly
free and familiar, and one must see the highest court
officials kissing the hem of the Sultan’s robe,
and hear authentic tales of slaves given by one merchant
to another at the end of a convivial evening, to be
reminded that nothing is as democratic in appearance
as a society of which the whole structure hangs on
the whim of one man.
