be neglected and is not easy to describe. The normal life
there is intensely exciting, not because the factions fight,
but rather because they do not fight. Of the abnormal crisis
when they did fight, and the abnormal motives that made them fight,
I shall have something to say later on. But it was true for a great
part of the time that what was picturesque and thrilling was not
the war but the peace. The sensation of being in this little town
is rather like that of being at a great international congress.
It is like that moving and glittering social satire, in which
diplomatists can join in a waltz who may soon be joining in a war.
For the religious and political parties have yet another point
in common with separate nations; that even within this narrow
space the complicated curve of their frontiers is really more
or less fixed, and certainly not particularly fluctuating.
Persecution is impossible and conversion is not at all common.
The very able Anglo-Catholic leader, to whom I have already referred,
uttered to me a paradox that was a very practical truth.
He said he felt exasperated with the Christian sects,
not for their fanaticism but for their lack of fanaticism.
He meant their lack of any fervour and even of any hope,
of converting each other to their respective religions.
An Armenian may be quite as proud of the Armenian Church as a Frenchman
of the French nation, yet he may no more expect to make a Moslem an
Armenian than the Frenchman expects to make an Englishman a Frenchman.
If, as we are told, the quarrels could be condemned as merely
theological, this would certainly be the very reverse of logical.
But as I say, we get much nearer to them by calling them national;
and the leaders of the great religions feel much more like
the ambassadors of great nations. And, as I have also said,
that ambassadorial atmosphere can be best expressed on the word irony,
sometimes a rather tragic irony. At any tea-party or talk in the street,
between the rival leaders, there is a natural tendency to that sort
of wit which consists in veiled allusion to a very open secret.
Each mail feels that there are heavy forces behind a small point,
as the weight of the fencer is behind the point of the rapier.
And the point can be yet more pointed because the politics of the city,
when I was there, included several men with a taste and talent for such
polished intercourse; including especially two men whose experience
and cultur