The New Jerusalem | Page 9

clearer in the ancient centres of the
East. It is often said that we can only appreciate the work of England in
a place like India. In so far as this is true, it is quite equally true that we
can only appreciate the work of France in a place like Egypt. But this
work is of a peculiar and even paradoxical kind. It is too practical to be
prominent, and so universal that it is unnoticed.
The French view of the Rights of Man is called visionary; but in
practice it is very solid and even prosaic. The French have a unique and
successful trick by which French things are not accepted as French.
They are accepted as human. However many foreigners played football,
they would still consider football an English thing. But they do not
consider fencing a French thing, though all the terms of it are still
French. If a Frenchman were to label his hostelry an inn or a public
house (probably written publicouse) we should think him a victim of
rather advanced Anglomania. But when an Englishman calls it an hotel,
we feel no special dread of him either as a dangerous foreigner or a
dangerous lunatic. We need not recognise less readily the value of this

because our own distinction is different; especially as our own
distinction is being more distinguished. The spirit of the English is
adventure; and it is the essence of adventure that the adventurer does
remain different from the strange tribes or strange cities, which he
studies because of their strangeness. He does not become like them, as
did some of the Germans, or persuade them to become like him, as do
most of the French. But whether we like or dislike this French capacity,
or merely appreciate it properly in its place, there can be no doubt
about the cause of that capacity. The cause is in the spirit that is so
often regarded as wildly Utopian and unreal. The cause is in the
abstract creed of equality and citizenship; in the possession of a
political philosophy that appeals to all men. In truth men have never
looked low enough for the success of the French Revolution. They have
assumed that it claims to be a sort of divine and distant thing, and
therefore have not noticed it in the nearest and most materialistic things.
They have watched its wavering in the senate and never seen it walking
in the streets; though it can be seen in the streets of Cairo as in the
streets of Paris.
In Cairo a man thinks it English to go into a tea-shop; but he does not
think it French to go into a cafe. And the people who go to the tea-shop,
the English officers and officials, are stamped as English and also
stamped as official. They are generally genial, they are generally
generous, but they have the detachment of a governing group and even
a garrison. They cannot be mistaken for human beings. The people
going to a cafe are simply human beings going to it because it is a
human place. They have forgotten how much is French and how much
Egyptian in their civilisation; they simply think of it as civilisation.
Now this character of the older French culture must be grasped because
it is the clue to many things in the mystery of the modern East. I call it
an old culture because as a matter of fact it runs back to the Roman
culture. In this respect the Gauls really continue the work of the
Romans, in making something official which comes at last to be
regarded as ordinary. And the great fundamental fact which is
incessantly forgotten and ought to be incessantly remembered, about
these cities and provinces of the near East, is that they were once as
Roman as Gaul.

There is a frivolous and fanciful debate I have often had with a friend,
about whether it is better to find one's way or to lose it, to remember
the road or to forget it. I am so constituted as to be capable of losing
my way in my own village and almost in my own house. And I am
prepared to maintain the privilege to be a poetic one. In truth I am
prepared to maintain that both attitudes are valuable, and should exist
side by side. And so my friend and I walk side by side along the ways
of the world, he being full of a rich and humane sentiment, because he
remembers passing that way a few hundred times since his childhood;
while to me existence is a perpetual fairy-tale, because I have forgotten
all about it. The lamp-post which moves him to a tear of reminiscence
wrings from me a cry of