THE SACREDNESS OF SITES

IT IS impossible to make a list of the things that humanitarians do not know about humanity. On thousands of things the men who talk most of the common bond are ignorant of what is really common. Among a thousand of such things may be mentioned the instinct about the sacredness of sites. If there is one thing that men have proved again and again it is that even when they furiously burn down a temple, they like to put another on top of it. They do not, generally speaking, want to worship St. George except on the very spot where they once worshipped the Dragon. And even when they have altered the universe they do not alter the situation. What is the reason for this, and whether it is some hitherto nameless need of human nature, or whether there be indeed something behind those ancient legends of the genius loci, or spirit of the place, need not now be discussed. But it is certain that throughout all history there has been a rhythm of ex pansion and contraction from certain centres; and that, unless we would be as superficial as the shallowest journalists, we can see under all changes that these centres remain. It is commonplace that empires pass away, because empires were never very important. Empires are frivolous things, the fringes of a sprawling culture that has sprawled too far. Cities do not pass away, or very seldom pass away, because the city is the cell of our organic formation; and even those living in the vast void of empire can find no phrase for social duty, save to tell men to be good citizens.

Empires pass away almost as if to accentuate the fact that cities do not pass away. At least five empires have successively claimed suzerainty over little Jerusalem upon the hill; and they are all now mere namesEgypt and Babylon and Persia and Macedonia and Rome; and for those unaffected by names these are unimportant. But Jerusalem is not unimportant; it is, at this very moment when I write, the scene of surging and threatening conflict. There was a Byzantine Empire and there is still a Turkish Empire, and one may soon be as dead as the other; but it will always matter who holds San Sophia and the town of Constantine upon the Golden Horn. Paris is older than France and York is older than England; and Cologne is immeasurably older than Germany. These centres of civilization have something in them more magnetic and immortal even than nationality, let alone mere vulgar imperialism. Ghosts haunt houses, they say, and the ghosts of whole people haunt whole cities, till half Europe is like a haunted house. It is only dull materialists who can wander away into any material environment. The spirit and all that is spiritual returns to its own environment. The world ebbs back again to its cities, to its centres; it is true, as I have said, of many cities; it is most true of the most central city of Rome.

Everything was done to take away the Roman character from Rome. The Emperor was taken away, but the Pope remained. The Pope was taken away, but the Pope returned. The former could not make a new Rome at Byzantium. The latter could not make a new Rome at Avignon. The former experiment had behind it the great civilization of the Greeks, the latter had behind it the great civilization of the French. The Greek Emperors thought they could move it easily to the East and the French Kings that they could move it easily to the West. But Rome, especially Christian Rome, is a rock not easily to be moved; and in the course of but a few centuries, as history goes, she had seen the French Monarchy go down before, the Jacobins as she had seen the Greek Empire go down before the Moslems.

I am now about to utter a sentence of familiar and horrid cant, which I fear may be respectfully received. It is said everywhere, in a sense that is quite false; and yet, strangely enough, it is quite true. I am going to say that the world is not yet ready for enforced international peace and disarmament in Europe. In all the welter of wordy hypocrisy that makes so much of modern culture and moral science, I know nothing so contemptible, as a rule, as that evolutionary excuse about the world not being ripe. It is said by Socialists who do not want to leave off being Capitalists. It is said by war-profiteers who would like one more war to make them millionaires, and then eternal peace; or by high-minded gluttons and epicures who would like their grandchildren to be vegetarians. So the employer may go on sweating because the world is not ready for Communism; or the huckster may go on swindling because the social evolution of man has not yet reached the point of common honesty; or the politician may bribe and be bribed at leisure, because the social prophets have calculated an exact and distant, date for Utopia. But they can all sweat and swindle, and bribe hopefully, happily, with radiant faces, because Utopia is sure to come some timeand for somebody else. Ninety times out of a hundred this moral distinction is false and cowardly; but in this special case, for one special reason, it does really apply. I doubt very much whether there will ever be a time when there will be no war. I cannot imagine how there can be a time in which there can be no war. But I do believe that, if the life of Europe evolves in one particular way, there may yet be something very like real European unity; an international understanding that would really prevent many international misunderstandings. But of that development it really is true to say that it has not happened yet, and that, until it has happened, we must not act as if it had.

Human unity is a huge and overwhelming truth, in the face of which all differences of continent or country are flattened out. European unity is an ancient fundamental and sometimes invisible truth, which every white man will discover if he meets another white man in Central Africa or un penetrated Tibet. But national unity is a truth; and a truth which cannot, must not, and will not be denied, but chiefly for these very reasonsthat nationality is human and that nationality is European. The man who forgets nationality instantly becomes less human and less European. He seems somehow to have turned into a walking abstraction, a resolution of some committee, a programme of some political movement, and to be by some unmistakable transformation, striking chill like the touch of a fish, less of a living man. The European man is a man through his patriotism and the particular civilization of his people. The cosmopolitan is not a European, still less a good European. He is a traveller in Europe, as if he were a tourist from the moon. In other words, what has happened is this; that for good or evil, European history has produced European nations by a European process; they are the organs of the organic life of our race, at least in recent times; and unless we receive our natural European inheritance through those natural organs, we do not really receive it at all. We receive something else; a priggish and provincial abstraction, invented by a few modern and more or less ignorant men. So long as those organs are the only organs of a living tradition, we must live by them; and it is true to say that the time has not yet come for all the nations living by a tradition that they can all hold and inherit together. It means finding something that good men love even more than they love their country. And modern Europe has not got it yet.

I will not argue here about how Europe is to get it; but I would suggest that it might possibly begin by returning to the civic origins. I mean that the countries may not expand to the continents, but rather return to the cities. Humanity may find in the cities what might yet become a universal citizenship, as it did with the cities of antiquity. But it could only happen with the cities that are really antique. It would mean the sort of cities which we only call ancient because they are still alive. But it would repose on the real and profoundly human sentiment about sites, for sites are generally shrines.