Without Prejudice

by Израэль Зангвилл

  But the other instance of converting realities into spectacles is not so commendable. In the supplementary exhibition of "Old Buda" stands a reproduction of an Old Buda mosque, built of stone, majolica and wood, in a mixture of Turkish and European architecture, with minaret and cupolas, and a small kiosk in the Indian style for a sleeping fakir. Here Moslems and Dervishes assemble to say or dance their prayers; and for a florin you may ascend the gallery and watch them below. The mosque opened on the holy night of Bairam, the most solemn feast of the Mohammedan year, and quite a crowd planked down their silver to listen to the pious worshippers. Is it not shameful? I am happy to say I did not pay for my seat. Even in Budapest I was a persona gratis. 'T was certainly a remarkable scene, its solemnity emphasized by the thunder without, that drowned the voice of the mueddin calling to prayer, and by the lightning and rain-torrents that sent the pretty little al fresco waitresses scudding about with their serviettes on their heads to tend the few parties in the leafy square that dined on regardless of diluted wine or under the protection of umbrellas. How the Turks further wetted themselves by complex ablutions in the tank (meydiah) in the courtyard without, how they removed their shoes and, entering the mosque, knelt on their carpets facing towards Mecca, and turning their backs on me, a serried array of long-robed figures swaying and falling forward with automatic regularity, and showing pairs of heels not always clean, while the Imam chanted heart-breaking dirges overhead, I shall not detail, for everybody has read of Moslem, services. But I do not remember to have come across any accurate description of a service of Dancing Dervishes such as followed the more orthodox ceremonial.

  All the mere Mussulmans having retired, the Dervishes sat around cross-legged, forming an oval. Presently they began to say some phrase, presumably Turkish (it sounded like es "klabbam vivurah" ), which they repeated and repeated and repeated with the same endless, uniform, monotonous intonation, swaying from right to left and from left to right, till I felt the whole universe was this phrase, and nothing else would happen till the end of the world, and the world would never end. At last, when I had reconciled myself to living for ever and ever with this sound in my ears, they broke into a pleasant melody with rhyming stanzas and a refrain of Hazlee. Then they started on another word with endless iteration, and then they repeated Allah, Allah, Allah, swaying and swaying till the universe began to reel. I became aware that their chief, who was seated on a special red carpet, was counting on a rosary, and I drew relief from the deduction that an end would come. It did, but worse remained behind; for the Dervishes got up and formed a ring round their chief, and began swaying right and left and backwards and forwards, unrestingly, remorselessly, getting quicker and quicker, till there was nothing in the world but swayings this way and that way, back and forth.

  At last the movements began to slow down and to sweep over larger curves, and suddenly they stopped altogether, only to recommence as the fanatics started singing a joyous hymn. Alas! thought I, one half the world is a laughing-stock to the other half, if indeed not rather a source of tears. For now the chief, whose fine gloomy Eastern face still haunts me, was bowing to his men, and they were responding with strange raucous cries compounded of the roars of wild beasts and the pants of locomotives. Hu! Hu! they roared in savage unison, Hu! Hu! monotonously, endlessly, making strange motions. Hoarser and more bestial grew the frightful roars, wilder and wilder grew the movements, the head-gear falling off, faces growing black, the chief standing silent with his hand on his breast, but in his pale face a tense look of ever-gathering excitement. And then two of the Dervishes held out a curved sword, and the roars redoubled and the chests heaved with wilder breaths; and suddenly the Chief, throwing off his stocking-wraps, jumped on the blade with his naked feet and balanced himself upon it, the muscles of his face rigid, his teeth clenched. Four times he stood upon the bare sword-edge amid this hellish howling and this mad swaying, the perspiration running down the foreheads of the devotees, some of them foaming at the mouth. And then they moved round in a circle to the right, howling He! He! an Armenian Dervish in a tall brown hat varying it by Ho! Ho! and another worshipper singing in a high voice.

  The chief bared his breast, and twirling a heavy-hafted dagger, plunged it into his side. When this had been repeated three or four times, pandemonium ceased. The Holy Man, with an air of supreme exhaustion and supreme ecstasy, reclad himself in his white mantle, and the faithful ones wiped their brows, and re-squatting on the ground exultantly vociferated Allah about a hundred times, nodding their heads, and finally changing their cry into Bou! Bou! After a little singing and a shouting of Din! Din! they pressed their foreheads to the ground with a shout of Bou! and suddenly rose and decamped. Other nights other services, and the hysterical worship sometimes embraces a sort of serpentine skirt-dancing with frenzied twirling. There was no blood from the chief's wounds, but the performance does not seem to me to be jugglery. It seems rather akin to hypnotism. The wild cries and gyrations induce a state of anesthesia, just as by the excitement of battle the soldier is so wrought up that he does not feel his wounds. Even in a sham fight a soldier told me he got to such a pitch that he could have done or suffered anything. As for the blood not running from the wounds, I conjecture that the places had become insensitive by frequent stabbing in the same spot. And this is the miracle that testifies to the saintliness of the Dervish and to the truth of his doctrines! I suspect that much of "the wisdom of the East" is of this character: ancient discoveries of the shady side of human psychology, the grotesque aberrations, trances, hypnotic impressionability, double personalities, ghosts, second-sight, what not. And these being misunderstood have always been supposed to trench on the divine. For what is not normal is not human, and what is not human is superhuman. So runs the simple logic. But hysteria can never be a foundation for a creed, and a true religion must always appeal to the common central facts of human experience.

  There was another Exhibition going on, as it always goes on, in the town, for the People's Park has very little verdure and consists almost entirely of side-shows and open-air restaurants. I saw swings and merry-go-rounds, a circus, and a marionette theatre, and heard Punch and Judy discussing their domestic differences in Hungarian, and Toby barking in the same uncouth tongue. The joy with which the public greeted each crack on the head administered by Herr Punch's stick showed me how hopeless it was to write literary plays. For the primitive emotions will always be the most captivating. A fight must ever beat the most subtle psychology; and indeed those writers for whom the drama is the art of manufacturing excitement and suspense must find it difficult to compete with a lottery drawing, a prize-fight, or a horse-race, where the issue is known not even to the organiser of the excitement. And this consideration will show why some books are very successful, the art of which is very little. Nothing is harder in real life than to put your back against the wall on a dark staircase and keep three armed men at bay with your whirling sword. But nothing is easier than for the romantic writer to dip his pen in ink and say that his hero did that. And nothing is more stimulating and exciting for the reader than to imagine the hero doing it; and in his gratitude to the giver of all this beautiful breathlessness he is likely, unless he is an analytical person, to mistake a cheap effect for precious art. But the bulk of humanity must always remain at the Punch-and-Judy stage of art. If only the critics would outgrow it! The clowns in the circus who came on with red noses were a further proof of the sempiternal simplicity of our race; and I could have wished for the heart of that urchin whom I saw trying to peer in under the canvas, and whom, with a reminiscence of the young Gradgrinds, I was about to pay for, when he suddenly produced a florin and many coppers and went in like a man. Sitting in the front row, I had a curious presentiment that the daring bare-backed rider would be thrown at my feet; and sure enough he was, and, as I picked him up,, I saw by the perspiration what toil his graceful feats concealed. Poor cavalier! I am sure his pride was more hurt than his person, and he excelled himself in galloping r
ound poised on one toe. When he was recalled after his exit, he tumbled his thanks, giving us complex somersaults in lieu of bows. I sometimes fancy he was a holier person than the Chief of the Dancing Dervishes.

  CHICAGO

  The function and value of literature are curiously illustrated by the passing away of the Great White Elephant. The criticisms by spectators of the World's Fair have not been so comprehensive as the Fair itself, and I feel that I ought to supplement them by the impressions it made upon one who did not see it. For, despite the assurance of the official programme, that I delivered an address in the Parliament of Religions, I was in England, so far as I know, the whole time. The first impression the Fair made upon me was one of sublimity-but of what Sir William Hamilton calls "the material sublime," scarcely at all of "the moral sublime," which was supposed to be its raison d'etre. I was, of course, aware that great spiritual facts underlay the physical grandeurs; but spiritual emotion is difficult to get at a distance. One requires the actual objects to impinge on the soul, the architectural glories and industrial splendours to touch through bodily vision. One realises it so vaguely, and fails to get the half-aesthetic, half-religious, uplifting that concrete visualisation should supply. It is, perhaps, a pity that Whitman did not live to see the spectacle, he whose inspiration came so often from synthesis, from a vision of the ALL. The cosmopolitan cataloguer, the man who made inventories almost epical, is the one man to whom the Fair would have been a magnificent inspiration. Judging from the Fair, Whitman would seem justified in claiming to be the voice of America. The Fair was like him both in its moral broadness and its material all-inclusiveness. In his absence no poet has risen "to the height of this great argument," so that now the insubstantial pageant is faded, now that "the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples," have dissolved, "like the baseless fabric of a vision," they have left not a rack of real literature behind. And to what but literature can one look for a permanent conservator of the eternal lesson of an ephemeral exhibition? Truly, as the Latin poet said, literature is more durable than monuments and dynasties. Except as an object-lesson in the unity and federation of mankind, the Fair had no valuable raison d'etre, and, unfortunately, the school-term was short and the number of pupils comparatively limited.

  America is a long way from everywhere, even from itself, and the moral heat dissipates in crossing the ocean to the Old World. The Congress of Religions in whose voluminous report the Fair has still a chance of surviving itself, was the most patently spiritual side of the Exposition, and was, undoubtedly, a most valuable index of the progress of human catholicism. That the sects are as narrow as they are numerous, is still largely true, and half the world is still ignorant of how the other half prays, though by a happy accident of birth all the world inherits the one true religion. The greatest force in the universe is the "vis inertice," and the forces already at work must "dree their weird." To those who are outside all the sects without even circumscribing them, the World's Fair must bring home at once the greatness and vanity of man's life-man who lives like the angels and dies like the brutes-the mortal paradox that has puzzled all thinkers from the Psalmist to Pascal. For the unbeliever this must ever be the ugly reverse of all glories that are merely material, though the sensuous optimist need not allow the skeleton at the feast to spoil his appetite.

  The last impression made by the World's Fair upon me was one of sadness-sadness at not having seen it.

  EDINBURGH

  Till. I went to Edinburgh I did not know what "The Evergreen" was. Newspaper criticisms had given me vague misrepresentations of a Scottish "Yellow Book" calling itself a "Northern Seasonal." But even had I seen a copy myself I doubt if I should have understood it without going to Edinburgh and even had I gone to Edinburgh I should still have been in twilight had? I not met Patrick (Jeddes, Professor of Botany at the University of Dundee. For Patrick Gteddes is the key to the Northern position in life and letters. "The Evergreen" was not established as an antidote to the "Yellow Book," though it might well seem a colour counter-symbol-the green of spring set against the yellow of decadent leaves. It is, indeed, an antidote but undesigned; else had not yellow figured so profusely upon the cover. "The Evergreen" of to-day professes to be inspired by "The Evergreen" which Allan Eamsay published in 1724, to stimulate a return to local and national tradition and living nature. Patrick G-eddes and Colleagues, who publish it and other books-on a new system of giving the author all the profits, as certified by a chartered accountant-inherit Ramsay's old home. That is to say, they are located in a sort of "University Settlement," known as Ramsay Garden, a charming collection of flats, overlooking from its eastled hill the picturesque city, and built by the many-sided Professor of Botany, and they aspire also to follow in "the gentle shepherd's" footsteps as workers and writers, publishers and builders. In fact, their aim is synthesis, construction, after our long epoch of analysis) destruction. They would organise life as a whole, expressing themselves through educational and civic activities, through art and architecture, and make of Edinburgh the "Cite du Bon Accord" dreamed of by Elisee Reclus. They feel acutely the "need of fresh readings in life, of fresh groupings in science, both now mainly from the humanist's side, as lately from the naturalist's side." In this University Settlement the publishing and writing department is to represent the scriptorium of the ancient monasteries. Of the local and national traditions this new Scottish school is particularly concerned to foster the so-called "Celtic renascence," and-what is more interesting to outsiders-the revival and development of the old Continental sympathies of Scotland. The ancient league with France has deeply marked Scotch history, and even moulded Scotch architecture. As Disraeli said in his inaugural address on his institution as Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, "it is not in Scotland that the name of France will ever be mentioned without affection." So, among the endless projects of the effervescent Professor, is one for reviving the Scotch college in Paris-the original building happening still to survive-and for making it a centre for Scottish students and Scottish culture in the gay city.

  Thus, while the men of "The Evergreen" would renew local feeling and local colour, they "would also express the larger view of Edinburgh as not only a National and Imperial but a European city-the larger view of Scotland, again as in recent, in mediaeval, most of all in ancient times, one of the European Powers of Culture-as of course far smaller countries like Norway are to-day." An aspiration with which all intelligent men must sympathise. The quest at once of local colour and cosmopolitanism is not at all self-contradictory. The truest cosmopolitanism goes with the intensest local colour, for otherwise you contribute nothing to the human treasury and make mankind one vast featureless monotony. Harmonious diversity is the true cosmopolitan concept, and who will not applaud this desire of Edinburgh to range itself again amongst the capitals of culture? Why should it take its tone from London? That centripetal force which draws villages to towns and towns to capitals everywhere tends to concentrate in one city a country's culture, and to brand as provincial that which is not of the centre. But the centre is corrosive of originality, and if now and then a great man does abide therein, it is because he has the gift of solitude amid crowds, and is not obnoxious to the contagion of the common thought. The Scotch School, though its effort to emancipate itself from the intellectual thraldom of London is to be commended, does not escape the dangers that lie in wait for all schools, which upset one convention by another. Still, a school of thought which is also a school of action has in itself the germs of perpetual self-recuperation.

  Yes, there can be little danger of sinking into barren formulae, into glib aesthetic prattle about Renascence, in a movement of which one expression is the purification of those plaguy, if picturesque, Closes, which are the foul blot upon the beautiful Athens of the North. Those sunless courts, entered by needles' eyes of apertures, congested with hellish, heaven-scaling barracks, reeking with refuse and evil odours, inhabited promiscuously by poverty and prostitution, worse
than the worst slums of London itself-how could they have been left so long to pollute the fairest and well-nigh the wealthiest city in the kingdom? "Do you wonder Edinburgh is renowned for its medical schools?" asked the Professor grimly, as he darted in and out among those foul alleys, explaining how he was demolishing this and reconstructing that-at once a Destroying Angel and a Redeemer. Veritable ghettoes they seemed, these blind alleys of gigantic habitations, branching out from the High Street, hidden away from the superficial passer-by faring to Holyrood. They were the pioneers of the trans-Atlantic sky-builders, were those old burghers, who, shut in about their castled hill by the two lochs, one of which is now the enchanting Princes Street, were fain to build heavenwards as population grew. It was a stormy morning when the mercurial Professor of Botany, recking naught of the rain that saturated his brown cloak, itself reluctantly donned, led me hither and thither, through the highways and byways of old Edinburgh. Everywhere a litter of building operations, and we trod gingerly many a decadent stair-case. Sometimes a double row of houses had already been knocked away, revealing a Close within a Close, eyeless house behind blind alley, and even so the diameter of the court still but a few yards. What human ant-heaps, what histories, farces, tragedies played out in airless tenebrosity!