Against this vast permanent and rooted influence we have nothing to offer. Our designs of material benefit or of positive enlightenment are to the presence of this common creed as is some human machine to the sea. We can pass through it, but we cannot occupy it. It spreads out before our advance, it closes up behind. Nor will our work be accomplished until we have recovered, perhaps through disasters suffered in our European homes, the full tradition of our philosophy and a faith which shall permeate all our actions as completely as does this faith of theirs.
That no religion brought by us stands active against their own is an apparent weakness in the reconquest, but that consequence of the long indifference through which Europe has passed is not the only impediment it has produced. The dissolution of the principal bond between Europeans—the bond of their traditional ritual and confession—has also prevented the occupation of Africa from being, as it should have been, a united and therefore an orderly campaign of the West to recover its own.
|Cause of Isolated French Action|
Had not our religion suffered the violent schisms which are now so slowly healing, and had not our general life resolved itself for a time into a blind race between the various provinces of Europe, the reconquest of Barbary would have fallen naturally to the nations which regard each its own section of the opposing coast; as in the reconquest of Spain the Asturias advanced upon Leon, the Galicians upon Portugal, and Old Castille upon the southern province to which it extended its own name. Then Italy would have concerned itself with Tunis—with Ifrigya, that is—and with the rare fringe of the Tripolitan and its shallow harbours. The French would have occupied Numidia. The Spaniards would have swept on to re-Christianise the last province of the west from Oran to the Atlantic, and so have completed the task which they let drop after the march upon Granada. Such should have been the natural end of mediæval progress, and that reconstruction of the Empire (which was the nebulous but constant goal towards which the Middle Ages moved) would have been accomplished. But the most sudden and the most inexplicable of our revolutions came in and broke the scheme. The Middle Ages died without a warning. A curious passion for metaphysics seized upon certain districts of the north, which in their exaltation attempted to live alone: the south, in resisting the disruption of Europe, exhausted its energies; and meanwhile the temptation to exploit the Americas and the Indies drained the Mediterranean of adventurers and of navies. Islam in its lethargy acquired new vigour from its latest converts, and the Turks, with none but the Venetians to oppose them, tore away from us the whole of the Levant and rode up the Danube to insult the centre of the continent. The European system flew apart, and its various units moved along separate paths with various careers of hesitation or of fever. It was not until the Revolution and the reconstitution of sane government among us that the common scheme of the west could reappear.
On this account—on account of the vast disturbance which accompanied the Reformation and the Renaissance—Europe halted for three centuries. When at last a force landed upon the southern shore of the Mediterranean, it was a force which happened to be despatched by the French.
|The French|
The vices and the energy of this people are well known. They are perpetually critical of their own authorities, and perpetually lamenting the decline of their honour. There is no difficulty they will not surmount. They have crossed all deserts and have perfected every art. Their victories in the field would seem legendary were they not attested; their audacity, whether in civil war or in foreign adventure, has permanently astonished their neighbours to the south, the east and the north. They are the most general in framing a policy and the most actual in pursuing it. Their incredible achievements have always the appearance of accidents. They are tenacious of the memory of defeats rather than of victories. They change more rapidly and with less reverence than any other men the external expression of their tireless effort, yet, more than any other men, they preserve—in spite of themselves—an original and unchanging spirit. Their boundaries are continually the same. They are acute and vivid in matters of reason, careless in those of judgment. A coward and a statesman are equally rare among them, yet their achievements are the result of prudence and their history is marked by a succession of silent and calculating politicians. Alone of European peoples the Gauls have, by a sort of habit, indulged in huge raids which seemed but an expense of military passion to no purpose. They alone could have poured out in that tide of the third century before our era to swamp Lombardy, to wreck Delphi, and to colonise Asia. They alone could have conceived the crusades: they alone the revolutionary wars. It is remarkable that in all such eruptions they alone fought eastward, marching from camp into the early light; they alone were content to return with little spoil and with no addition of provinces, to write some epic of their wars.
It is evident that such a people would produce in Africa, not a European and a general, but a Gallic and a particular effect. They boast themselves in everything the continuators of the Romans. They do, indeed, inherit the Roman passion for equality, and they, like the Romans, have tenaciously fought their way to equality by an effort spread over many hundred years. They are Roman in their careful building, in their strict roads, in their small stature, in their heavy chests, in their clarity of language, in their adoration of office and of symbol, in their lightning marches: the heavy lading of their troops, their special pedantry, their disgust at vagueness, their ambition and their honour are Roman. But they are not Roman in permanent stability of detail. The Romans spread an odour of religion round the smallest functions of the State: of the French you can say no more than that any French thing you see to-day may be gone to-morrow, and that only France remains. They are not Roman in the determination never to retreat, nor are they Roman in the worship of silence. The French can express the majesty of the Empire in art: they cannot act it in their daily life—for this inheritance of Rome the Spaniards are better suited. As for the Roman conception of a fatal expansion the Russians exceed them, and for the Roman ease and aptitude the Italians.
Had, then, the reconquest of Barbary fallen naturally to the three sisters—to Spain, to Italy, and to France, the long attempt of Europe might have reached its end. The Spaniard would have crushed and dominated in Morocco where the Mohammedan was most strongly entrenched; the Italian, with his subtle admixture, would have kneaded Tunis and the eastern march into a firm barrier; the French would have developed their active commerce upon the many small towns of the Central Tell, would have pierced, as they are fitted to pierce, the high Central Plateaux with admirable roads, and would have garrisoned, as their taste for a risk well fits them to garrison, the outposts of the Central Atlas against the desert. Then the task would be over, and Europe would be resettled within its original boundaries.