The common faith which was, as it were, the cement of our civilisation has been hit so hard that some do ask themselves openly the question that was only whispered some little time ago—whether the cement still holds. It is quite certain that if that last symbol and reality disintegrates, if the Catholic Church leaves it, Europe has come to an end.
But these questions are not yet to be met by any reply. And when I ask myself those questions, and I always do when I see the Seine going by the walls that were Cæsar's parleying ground with the chiefs, Dionysius's prison, Julian's office, Dagobert's palace, and which have been subject to everything from Charlemagne to the Bourbons, and which have (within the memory of men whom I myself have known) ended the Monarchy and seen passing by a wholly new society—when I ask myself those questions, I answer less and less with every year.
Time was, in the University, say twenty years ago, one would have said: "It is all over. Everything that can destroy us has triumphed." Time was, say ten years ago, in the heat of a particular struggle which raged all over the West, one could have said with the enthusiasm of the fight, that continuity would win. But to-day, whether because one has accumulated knowledge or because things are really more confused, it is difficult to reply.
* * * * *
A man with our knowledge and our experience of what Europe has been and is, standing in the grey and decayed Roman city of the Fifth Century, and watching the little barbarian troop riding into Lutetia, might have said that a gradual darkness would swallow us all, especially since he knew that just beyond the narrow seas in Eastern Britain a dense pall then covered the corpse of the Roman civilisation.
A man working on the Tour St. Jacques, the last of the Gothic, might have seen nothing but anarchy and the end of all good work in the change that was surging round him: the Huguenots, the new Splendour, the cruelty and the making of lies.
Certainly those who were present in Paris before the 10th of August,'92, thought an end had come, and believed the Revolution to be a most unfruitful and tempestuous death; imagining Europe to have no hope but in the possible extinction of the flame.
All three judgments would have been wrong. And when one takes that typical Paris again, and handles it and looks at it and thinks of it as the example and the symbol of all our time; just as one is beginning to say "The thing is dying," the memory of similar deaths that were not deaths in the past returns to one and one must be silent.
Never was Europe less conscious of herself, never did she more freely admit the forces that destroy, than she admits them to-day. Never was evil more insolently or more glaringly in power; never had it less fear of chastisement than in the whirlwind of our time. If that whirlwind is mechanical, and if this vast anarchic commerce, these blaring papers, these sudden fortunes, these frequent and unparalleled huge wars, are the breaking up of all that once made Europe, then the answer to the question is plain: but it may be that these are things not mechanical but organic: seeds surviving in the ruin which will grow up into living forms. We shall see.