literature and art.  This is not concerned with brutal outbreaks of revenge which may be found on both sides, or with chivalrous caprices of toleration, which may also be found on both sides; it is concerned with the inmost mentality of the two religions, which must be understood in order to do justice to either.  The Moslem mind never tended to that mystical mode of “loving yet leaving” with which Augustine cried aloud upon the ancient beauty, or Dante said farewell to Virgil when he left him in the limbo of the pagans.  The Moslem traditions, unlike the medieval legends, do not suggest the image of a knight who kissed Venus before he killed her.  We see in all the Christian ages this combination which is not a compromise, but rather a complexity made by two contrary enthusiasms; as when the Dark Ages copied out the pagan poems while denying the pagan legends; or when the popes of the Renascence imitated the Greek temples while denying the Greek gods.  This high inconsistency is inconsistent with Islam.  Islam, as I have said, takes everything literally, and does not know how to play with anything.  And the cause of the contrast is the historical cause of which we must be conscious in all studies of this kind.  The Christian Church had from a very early date the idea of reconstructing a whole civilisation, and even a complex civilisation.  It was the attempt to make a new balance, which differed from the old balance of the stoics of Rome; but which could not afford to lose its balance any more than they.  It differed because the old system was one of many religions under one government, while the new was one of many governments under one religion.  But the idea of variety in unity remained though it was in a sense reversed.  A historical instinct made the men of the new Europe try hard to find a place for everything in the system, however much might be denied to the individual.  Christians might lose everything, but Christendom, if possible, must not lose anything.  The very nature of Islam, even at its best, was quite different from this.  Nobody supposed, even subconsciously, that Mahomet meant to restore ancient Babylon as medievalism vaguely sought to restore ancient Rome.  Nobody thought that the builders of the Mosque of Omar had looked at the Pyramids as the builders of St. Peter’s might have looked at the Parthenon.  Islam began at the beginning; it was content with the idea that it had a great truth; as indeed it had a colossal truth.  It was so huge a truth that it was hard to see it was a half-truth.

Islam was a movement; that is why it has ceased to move.  For a movement can only be a mood.  It may be a very necessary movement arising from a very noble mood, but sooner or later it must find its level in a larger philosophy, and be balanced against other things.  Islam was a reaction towards simplicity; it was a violent simplification, which turned out to be an over-simplification.  Stevenson has somewhere one of his perfectly picked phrases