VII
In the brilliant years of Tlemcen, during which it was a spray of the flowering branch of Andalusian art, what is most striking and remains on the mind with a touch of surprise is the sense of the long and various contact of the Berber world with inherited Mediterranean civilization. We are accustomed to think of the north coast of Africa as a much-isolated country; but no place in the world is ever so isolated as it may seem to be; and the connection of the North African peoples with the centres of Christian history was never broken from the first Christian ages. Some Christian communities were encysted among the Berbers by the first Arab invasion; in the tenth century there were still five bishoprics among them. Charlemagne sent an embassy to Kairouan in respect to the relics of some saint at Carthage, in the reign of Ibrahim, the Aglabite, who received it with great splendor. The trade of the country was of vast territorial extent, reaching the Soudan and Central Africa and the furthest Mohammedan East; in the eleventh century negotiations were entered into with the Papacy with a view to attracting Christian merchants and markets. En-Nacer, a prince of the Hammadites, sent presents to Gregory VII, including all his Christian slaves. The contact with the Christians as enemies, in Sicily, Spain, and on the sea, was incessant in the period of Moslem power. Christians, too, made a part of the mercenary troops of the Moslem armies; the Beni-Mérin are said to have had at one time twelve thousand such troops, and Yarmorâsen had two thousand, who mutinied and were slain; these were the last of the Christian cavalry in Moslem pay.
Contact with the old civilization was still more intimate and continuous toward the East in commerce and the arts. The Berber tribes of the coast had contained artisans from Roman times; but the Arabs were from the beginning dependent on civilization for all articles of luxury, and, especially in their religious needs, for the architectural arts. The mosque was built on the plan of Byzantine churches, and the Greeks and Persians became the masters of construction and decoration in building; Roman temples and palaces and Christian churches were the quarries from which materials were taken. The great mosque at Kairouan is “a forest of columns” of antique make, and in this it is an example of a general practice. Original building came slowly into being, and was rudely imitative. The Andalusian art, as it is called, the special form in which the Moorish genius embodied itself, was evolved in Spain, and its history is incompletely made out; for although the Alhambra, together with other examples at Seville and Cordova, is its most perfect product, yet the art was developed also on the Moroccan side of the strait, and its creations at Fez, Marrâkeck, and other points still await thorough examination and study. The examples at Tlemcen belong to this African branch of the art, which was patronized by the early king of Tlemcen, and was most illustrated, perhaps, by the Beni-Mérin prince in his reign at Mansourah; for his predecessors at Fez had been rulers on both sides the strait, and were, therefore, in more immediate contact with the sources of the art, which, however, had already by reason of the emigrant Andalusians made Fez a noble Moorish city. As compared with Fez, Tlemcen was provincial.
The Berber princes ruled over a border state continually at war, and their city retained the rudeness of the nomad life; they were kings of a master-warrior caste among the other elements of the population, but with a pride in public works and a delight in decorative luxury, a capacity for civilization and elegance, which transformed them into accomplished princes of Andalusian culture, like their neighbors. In realizing their ambitions they were, however, dependent on the aid of their neighbors; they obtained both workmen, architects, and in some cases material already wrought, from Spain, and especially from the lord of Andalusia, Abou’l-Walîd, who sent them the ablest artisans he could command. The legend that the bronze plates of the door of the mosque of Sidi bou-Médyen were miraculously floated there from abroad doubtless contains the truth that they were brought from Spain. Some of the tiles are of foreign manufacture. The art, whether in spirit, style, or skill, is to be looked on as an importation, though it achieved its works on the spot. It affords admirable examples, and they are of uncommon purity, since each newcomer did not restore and refashion older work in current modes of later skill or taste, but left it, as the Arabs will, to its own decay; this art is seen, therefore, very often just as it was in its first creation save for the ravage of time.
It was not an art of structure, though at times, as in the tower at Mansourah, it has structural nobility, or, as elsewhere, lines of grace; neither the architects nor the workmen were expert builders, and they treated structural elements—the column, the arch, the dome—decoratively; these were subordinated to a decorative intention. The genius for decoration, however, found its main channel in the treatment of surfaces, sometimes curved and limited, but usually flat and spacious. It sprang rather from the art of graving than of modelling, and flowered especially in the line—arabesque. The line was employed in a series of geometric patterns—squares, polygons, circles—symmetrically arranged, and mingled with more or less distinctness; or in rectilineal or curvilineal combinations that were also patterns, repeated indefinitely; or in formalized script based on calligraphy. The origins of this mode go far back into antiquity; but its predominant use is the special trait of Moorish decoration. The second main feature of the art was in its color—mosaic. It is true that the lineal decoration of plaster and wood was painted, in red, blue, and olive-green, but this color has disappeared; for our eyes, so far as color is concerned, it is the mosaic that has survived; and here, too, the mosaic sometimes borrows its interior designs from the patterns of lineal decoration. The origin of this mosaic is also lost in antiquity; the art in one or another of its forms had long been widely diffused in the Mediterranean world. The Roman soil of Africa had been covered with mosaic floors, which may still be seen in beautiful and varied collections of them at Tunis and Sousse; Byzantine work, such as is found at Ravenna and in Sicily, was a living art through the Middle Ages; and the contemporary Persian manufacture of tiles and similar work passed everywhere in the commercial world, and may be closely connected technically with the art in Andalusia. It was for exterior decoration that the mosaic faience was principally employed. The motives of the lineal decoration are few—disks, stars, and the like—and in the floral design only the acanthus formalized is used; similarly, the colors of the mosaic are few—manganese-brown, white, copper-green, iron-yellow, rarely blue. The combination of these few elements—colors and patterns—is unrestricted by any limit, they are undefined by any form, they grow by accretion, and they thus obtain and give the quality of the infinite, the illimitable, which is the most obvious trait of the arabesque. It is an art that plays with form only to escape from it, whether in color or in line.
The charm of this art does not lie merely in its perfect fitness to its light and cheap materials, nor in its easy solving of its own problems, but rather in its kinship to the Arab genius, its response to the desert spirit. This is most deeply felt in the mosques, where it is in contact with the gravest things in life. The mosque is the plainest of sacred places, and delights a Puritan soul. There are no images of humanized deities or deified men; there is neither god nor saint nor mythic story; neither is there any mystery of dogma or speculation to be told in symbolism of material things; there is only unbodied and unformulated religious awe, the worship of the spirit in the spirit. The art that defines has here no function. The Western genius, master of life, is a defining genius; the oriental way is different—it is an effusion, an expansion, an illimitable going forth. This art, too, with its few motives, its paucity of fact, its monotony of structure, yet issuing always on the illimitable, the infinite, resumes the structure of the desert, which is similar in its elements and effects, its composition and its sentiment. It is also completely free from the burden of thought, the fatal gift of Western genius with its hard definings, too avid of knowing, whose art is rather a means to cage than to free the bird of life. It is an art restorative of the senses in their own kingdom—whether in line or color, a pure joy to the eye, a “disembodied joy,” too, as art should be, full of abstraction, yet unconscious of anything beyond the sensuous sphere. It is easy to sum its salient technical points and to indicate its obvious affinities with the mosque, with desert nature, with the Arab genius; but even though he see it, one cannot easily appreciate it in its decay, nor well imagine it in its fresh beauty, as a visible harmony for the soul, without some initiation into the fundamental moods of the race for whom and of whom it was. To me, nevertheless, the sight was a pure delight, as is the memory; a nomad art it seemed, born of the desert and expressive of it, an evanescence of beauty playing on fragile and humble materials, as life in the desert is fragile and humble, and clad in the evanescence of nature—life not too seriously valued, sure of speedy ruin, not worthy of too great outward cost.