In reading Carlyle’s “Heroes and Hero-worship” there is a haunting feeling that it was a pity that for the “Hero as Prophet” he chose Mahomet and not Jesus, or that, choosing Mahomet, he had not travelled in Mohammedan countries, investigating his subject more thoroughly and giving a truer picture of the significance of Mohammedanism and of the man who founded it. The Mahomet section of “Heroes” is like a note that does not sound. Heading the lecture over again, one is struck with a new fact about Carlyle—his insularity of intelligence. Despite the fact that he is preoccupied with French and German history, you notice his narrowness of vision, or perhaps it is that the general vision of the world which men have now was not so accessible in his day, and the differences in national psychology now manifest were hidden in obscurity then. Carlyle saw mankind as Scotsmen, and all true religion whatsoever as a sort of Southern Scottish Puritanism. He saw all national destinies in one and the same type, without any conception of fundamental differences of soul. He admired the Germans, and the Germans adopted him and his works. And he disliked the French because so few of them had that “fixity of purpose” and “manliness,” “thoroughness,” “grim earnestness” of his compatriots. Russia was a very vague country, but Carlyle approved of the Tsar, dimly discerning in him one who must have something in common with Cromwell or Frederick the Great, “keeping by the aid of Cossack and cannon such a vast empire together.” And the further his imagination ranges the more do his notions of foreign peoples and races fail to correspond with his patterns of humanity. Among the many other destinies which Carlyle might have had and lived through, one can imagine one wherein he travelled, and found in real life what he sought in museums and libraries. He would have been a wonderful traveller, and would have known and shown more of the verities and mysteries of the world than he was able to do through the medium of history.
Carlyle’s Mahomet is an example of old-fashioned visions. It is clear now that this “deep-hearted Son of the Wilderness, with his beaming black eyes and open social deep soul,” was not that determined, conscientious British sort of character that he is made out to be, nor has Mohammedanism that Cromwellian earnestness which Carlyle imputed to it.
It is impossible to find in the Moslem soul “the infinite nature of duty,” but we would not explain the “gross sensual paradise” and the “horrible flaming hell” of the Mohammedans by saying that to them “Right is to Wrong as life is to death, as heaven to hell. The one must nowise be done, the other in nowise be left undone.” Mahomet and Mohammedanism are not explainable in these terms.
Probably the most common assumption in the West is that Mohammedanism does not count. In its adherents it greatly outnumbers Christianity, but not even those who believe that the will of majorities should prevail would recognise the Mohammedan majority. For though more warlike than we, they have not our weapons, and though they are finer physically, they have not our helps to Nature, nor our civilisation, nor our passion. They are apart, they are scarcely human beings in our Western sense of the term, and are negligible. Still, Mohammedanism is an extraordinary portent in the world. The Mohammedans, those many millions, are not merely potential Christians, a set of people remaining in error because our missionary enterprise is not sufficient to bring them to the Light. It is not an accident, or a makeshift religion, but evidently a happy form suitable to the millions who embody it. It is a poetically fitting religion, part of the very fibre of the people who have it, and it cannot easily be got rid of or supplanted.
As enthusiastic Christians we consider the Moslem world with some vexation; some of us even with malice and a readiness to take arms against it. But as pleasure-seeking tourists and worldly men and women, we rather love the Turk and the Arab for his “picturesqueness,” for the picturesqueness of his religion. As sportsmen, we love him because he has the reputation of fighting well.
MOHAMMEDAN TOMBS AND RUINS IN THE YOUNGEST OF THE RUSSIAN COLONIES
It was with a certain amount of dissatisfaction that I fell into the hands of an Arab guide when I was in Cairo, and was shown, first of all, the picturesque mosques so beloved of tourists—the Mosque of Sultan Hassan, the Alabaster Mosque, and so on. Not the ancient Egyptian remains, which are the most significant thing in Egypt; not the Early Christian ruins, which are most dear to us (the old Christian monasteries which the Copts possess seemed to be known by none), but the mosques made of the stolen stones of the Pyramids and of the tombs, and inlaid with the jewels taken from ikon frames and rood-screens of the first churches of Christianity. And as I listened to the details of the blinding of the architects, the destruction of the Mamelukes, the fighting and the robbing, the disparaging thought arose: “They are all a pack of robbers, these Mohammedans.”
They are robbers by instinct, and non-progressive not only in life, but in ideas. But they are picturesque, and have given to a considerable portion of the earth’s face a characteristic quaintness and beauty. They cannot be dismissed.
Carlyle tries to see some light in the Koran, and fails. Probably the Koran is translated in a wrong spirit or to suit a British taste. But obviously it is meant to be chanted, and it is full of rhythms with which we are unfamiliar, as unfamiliar as we are with the sobbing, plaintive, screaming music that is melody in the Moslem’s ears. The soul of the Koran is not like the soul of the Bible, just as the soul of a mediæval Christian city such as Florence or Rome is unlike Khiva or Bokhara or Samarkand, just as the souls of our eager mystical populations are different from the souls of those simple, satisfied and fatalistic people. It is not easy to communicate the difference by words; it is not merely a difference in clothes. It is a difference in the spirit, a difference in the spirit that causes the expression to be different, whether that expression be clothes, or houses, or cities, or way of life, or music, or literature, or prayer. And while our expression changes, theirs remains the same. Our spirit remains the same, theirs remains the same, but only with us does the expression change.