CHAPTER LIII
ARABIA
'Tis beneath the dusky tent of the Bedouin Arab that we seek the model and the home of true love. There, as elsewhere, solitude and a fine climate have kindled the noblest passion of the human heart—that passion which must give as much happiness as it feels, in order to be happy itself.
In order that love may be seen in all the fullness of its power over the human heart, equality must be established as far as possible between the mistress and her lover. It does not exist, this equality, in our poor West; a woman deserted is unhappy or dishonoured. Under the Arab's tent faith once plighted cannot be broken. Contempt and death immediately follow that crime.
Generosity is held so sacred by this people, that you may steal, in order to give. For the rest, every day danger stares them in the face, and life flows on ever, so to speak, in a passionate solitude. Even in company the Arabs speak little.
Nothing changes for the inhabitant of the desert; there everything is eternal and motionless. This singular mode of life, of which, owing to my ignorance, I can give but a poor sketch, has probably existed since the time of Homer.[1] It is described for the first time about the year 600 of our era, two centuries before Charlemagne.
Clearly it is we who were the barbarians in the eyes of the East, when we went to trouble them with our crusades.[2] Also we owe all that is in our manner to these crusades and to the Moors of Spain. If we compare ourselves with the Arabs, the proud, prosaic man will smile with pity. Our arts are very much superior to theirs, our systems of law to all appearance still more superior. But I doubt if we beat them in the art of domestic happiness—we have always lacked loyalty and simplicity. In family relations the deceiver is the first to suffer. For him the feeling of safety is departed; always unjust, he is always afraid.
In the earliest of their oldest historical monuments we can see the Arabs divided from all antiquity into a large number of independent tribes, wandering about the desert. As soon as these tribes were able to supply, with more or less ease, the simplest human wants, their way of life was already more or less refined. Generosity was the same on every side; only according to the tribe's degree of wealth it found expression, now in the quarter of goat's flesh necessary for the support of life, now in the gift of a hundred camels, occasioned by some family connexion or reasons of hospitality.
The heroic age of the Arabs, that in which these generous hearts burnt unsullied by any affectation of fine wit or refined sentiment, was that which preceded Mohammed; it corresponds to the fifth century of our era, to the foundations of Venice and to the reign of Clovis. I beg European pride to compare the Arab love-songs, which have come down to us, and the noble system of life revealed in the Thousand and One Nights, with the disgusting horrors that stain every page of Gregory of Tours, the historian of Clovis, and of Eginhard, the historian of Charlemagne.
Mohammed was a puritan; he wished to prescribe pleasures which do no one any harm; he has killed love in those countries which have accepted Islamism.[3] It is for this reason that his religion has always been less observed in Arabia, its cradle, than in all the other Mohammedan countries.