The Land Of The Two Rivers (1918)

Few catchwords have more misled popular opinion than that of " the unchangeable East." One can see how it arose, that relative truth in it which made it plausible. It is true that the poorest stratum of society in all countries—those whose life is mainly jS,lled with the satisfaction of the most primitive needs, getting food out of the ground or out of the waters, keeping their bodies warm and dry—remains wonderfully uniform from age to age. (Or perhaps one should say " remained "; for modern civihzation, far more penetrating than any previous one—with popular education and motor-ploughs and cinemas—is affecting the life of the poorest in all European countries as it has never been affected before.) The different characteristics which in different regions mark the tillers of the soil and the fi.sher-folk of sea and river and lagoon have been largely caused by special physical conditions in those regions, which are permanent. It is true that the traveller to-day in Egypt may see the fellahin using various simple processes bwhich were used by their fathers three thousand years ago, and the traveller in Babylonia* may see on the rivers and canals rafts on inflated skins, like those described by Herodotus. If he talks to the people of the land, their outlook on the world may strike him as like that recorded in parts of the Bible. And the traveller, it may be, comes home declaring that the East never changes. But, if so, he forgets that this life of the cultivator and fisherman and hand-labourer has been in the past the substratum only beneath changing civiUzation, the basis for the life which thought and wrote and made poems and pictures and statues, which reared great monuments and works of pubUc use, which designed great schemes of law and government. And it is what man has achieved in these lines which gives their character and their interest to the civihzations of the past. In Italy, too, the traveller in some out-of-the-way country regions can still, or could tiU recently, find a primitive plough in use hke that described by Virgil. It would be a mistake, for that reason, to talk about the " unchangeable West," as if the Roman civilization which had been erected upon the basis of that old Italian country Ufe counted for nothing. The difference between Italy and the East is that here the vision of the traveller is so occupied with the manifestations of a still living and changing civilzation, the child of the old Roman, that there is no danger of his thinking that the relative constancy of Itahan peasant Ufe through the ages means that in Italy things are as they always have been. But if om* modern civilzation had perished and the tillers of the ground in Italy continued to follow their ancestral ways, then perhaps some traveller who had seen ancient ploughs depicted on vases or bas-reliefs, and saw the Uke still in use, might think of the West as simply this sort of thing indefinitely drawn out. In the East the old civilizations have been destroyed. What the traveler there sees of them to-day is the sordid reUc—the shreds and remains. He does not always apprehend the difference between the East that he sees and the East that was. He sees the same sort of boats being used on the Tigris as were used two thousand years ago. And he comes home saying the East never changes.