II
When I was in Marrakech word was sent to Captain de S., who was with me,
that a Caïd of the Atlas, whose prisoner he had been several years
before, had himself been taken by the Pasha's troops, and was in
Marrakech. Captain de S. was asked to identify several rifles which his
old enemy had taken from him, and on receiving them found that, in the
interval, they had been elaborately ornamented with the Arab niello work
of which the tradition goes back to Damascus.
This little incident is a good example of the degree to which the
mediaeval tradition alluded to by M. Saladin has survived in Moroccan
life. Nowhere else in the world, except among the moribund
fresco-painters of the Greek monasteries, has a formula of art persisted
from the seventh or eighth century to the present day; and in Morocco
the formula is not the mechanical expression of a petrified theology but
the setting of the life of a people who have gone on wearing the same
clothes, observing the same customs, believing in the same fetiches, and
using the same saddles, ploughs, looms, and dye-stuffs as in the days
when the foundations of the first mosque of El Kairouiyin were laid.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Marrakech--a street fountain]
The origin of this tradition is confused and obscure. The Arabs have
never been creative artists, nor are the Berbers known to have been so.
As investigations proceed in Syria and Mesopotamia it seems more and
more probable that the sources of inspiration of pre-Moslem art in North
Africa are to be found in Egypt, Persia, and India. Each new
investigation pushes these sources farther back and farther east; but it
is not of much use to retrace these ancient vestiges, since Moroccan art
has, so far, nothing to show of pre-Islamite art, save what is purely
Phenician or Roman.
In any case, however, it is not in Morocco that the clue to Moroccan art
is to be sought; though interesting hints and mysterious reminiscences
will doubtless be found in such places as Tinmel, in the gorges of the
Atlas, where a ruined mosque of the earliest Almohad period has been
photographed by M. Doutté, and in the curious Algerian towns of Sedrata
and the Kalaa of the Beni Hammads. Both of these latter towns were rich
and prosperous communities in the tenth century and both were destroyed
in the eleventh, so that they survive as mediaeval Pompeiis of a quite
exceptional interest, since their architecture appears to have been
almost unaffected by classic or Byzantine influences.
Traces of a very old indigenous art are found in the designs on the
modern white and black Berber pottery, but this work, specimens of which
are to be seen in the Oriental Department of the Louvre, seems to go
back, by way of Central America, Greece (sixth century B.C.) and Susa
(twelfth century B.C.), to the far-off period before the streams of
human invention had divided, and when the same loops and ripples and
spirals formed on the flowing surface of every current.
It is a disputed question whether Spanish influence was foremost in
developing the peculiarly Moroccan art of the earliest Moslem period, or
whether European influences came by way of Syria and Palestine, and
afterward met and were crossed with those of Moorish Spain. Probably
both things happened, since the Almoravids were in Spain; and no doubt
the currents met and mingled. At any rate, Byzantine, Greece, and the
Palestine and Syria of the Crusaders, contributed as much as Rome and
Greece to the formation of that peculiar Moslem art which, all the way
from India to the Pillars of Hercules, built itself, with minor
variations, out of the same elements.
Arab conquerors always destroy as much as they can of the work of their
predecessors, and nothing remains, as far as is known, of Almoravid
architecture in Morocco. But the great Almohad Sultans covered Spain and
Northwest Africa with their monuments, and no later buildings in Africa
equal them in strength and majesty.
It is no doubt because the Almohads built in stone that so much of what
they made survives. The Merinids took to rubble and a soft tufa, and the
Cherifian dynasties built in clay like the Spaniards in South America.
And so seventeenth century Meknez has perished while the Almohad walls
and towers of the tenth century still stand.
The principal old buildings of Morocco are defensive and religious--and
under the latter term the beautiful collegiate houses (the medersas) of
Fez and Salé may fairly be included, since the educational system of
Islam is essentially and fundamentally theological. Of old secular
buildings, palaces or private houses, virtually none are known to exist;
but their plan and decorations may easily be reconstituted from the
early chronicles, and also from the surviving palaces built in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even those which the wealthy
nobles of modern Morocco are building to this day.
The whole of civilian Moslem architecture from Persia to Morocco is
based on four unchanging conditions: a hot climate, slavery, polygamy
and the segregation of women. The private house in Mahometan countries
is in fact a fortress, a convent and a temple: a temple of which the god
(as in all ancient religions) frequently descends to visit his
cloistered votaresses. For where slavery and polygamy exist every
house-master is necessarily a god, and the house he inhabits a shrine
built about his divinity.
The first thought of the Moroccan chieftain was always defensive. As
soon as he pitched a camp or founded a city it had to be guarded
against the hungry hordes who encompassed him on every side. Each little
centre of culture and luxury in Moghreb was an islet in a sea of
perpetual storms. The wonder is that, thus incessantly threatened from
without and conspired against from within--with the desert at their
doors, and their slaves on the threshold--these violent men managed to
create about them an atmosphere of luxury and stability that astonished
not only the obsequious native chronicler but travellers and captives
from western Europe.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Rabat--gate of the Kasbah of the Oudayas]
The truth is, as has been often pointed out, that, even until the end of
the seventeenth century, the refinements of civilization were in many
respects no greater in France and England than in North Africa. North
Africa had long been in more direct communication with the old Empires
of immemorial luxury, and was therefore farther advanced in the arts of
living than the Spain and France of the Dark Ages; and this is why, in a
country that to the average modern European seems as savage as Ashantee,
one finds traces of a refinement of life and taste hardly to be matched
by Carlovingian and early Capetian Europe.
