244 ORIENTALISM The effect of this style is that it brings Asia tantalizingly close to the West, but only for a brief moment. We are left at the end with a sense of the pathetic distance still separating “us* from an Orient destined to bear its foreignness as a mark of its permanent estrangement from the West. This is the disappointing conclusion corroborated (conter.poraneously} by the ending of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, where Aziz and Fielding attempt, and fail at, reconciliation: “Why can’t we be friends now?” said the other, holding him affectionately. “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap, and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.” This style, this compact definition, is what the Orient will always come ap against. Despite its pessimism, there is a positive political message behind its phrases. The gulf between East and West can be modulated, as Cromer and Balfour knew well, by superior Western knowledge and power. Lawrence’s vision is complemented in France by Maurice Barrés’s Une Enquéte aux pays du Levant, the record of a journey through the Near Orient in 1914. Like so many works before it, the Enquéte is a work of recapitulation whose author not only searches out sources and origins of Western culture in the Orient but also redoes Nerval, Flaubert, and Lamartine in their voyages to the Orient. For Barrés, however, there is an additional political dimension to his journey: he seeks proof, and conclusive evidence, for a constructive French role in the East. Yet the difference between French and British expertise remains: the former manages an actual conjunction of peoples and territory, whereas the latter deals with a realm of spiritual possibility. For Barrés the French presence is best seen in French schools where, as he says of a school in Alexandria, “It It is ravishing to see those little Oriental girls welcoming and so wonderfully reproducing the fantaisie and the melody [in their spoken. French] of the Ile-deFrance.” Te France, oes nat Sarna, hhave..any.

prers 3 ete. Orientalism Now 245 There is, there in the Orient, a feeling about France which is so religious and strong that it is capable of absorbing and reconciling all our most diverse aspirations. In the Orient we represent spirituality, justice, and the category of the ideal. England is powerful there, Germany is all-powerful; but we possess Oriental souls. Arguing vociferously with Jaurés, this celebrated European doctor proposes to vaccinate Asia against its own illnesses, to occidentalize the Orientals, to bring them into salubrious contact with France. Yet even in these projects Barrés’s vision preserves the very distinction between East and West he claims to be mitigating. How will we be able to form for.ourselves.an intellectual elite with which we can work, made out of Orientals who would not be deracinated, who would continue to evolve according to their own norms, who would remain penetrated by family traditions, and who would thus form a tink between us aad the mass of natives? How will we create relationships with a view towards preparing KW the way for agreements and treaties which would be the desirable form taken by eur political future [in the Orient]? All these things are finally all all. about soliciting in these strange peoples the taste. for maintaining centact, with our intelligence, even though this taste may in fact come out of their own sense of their natienal destiny.“ The emphasis in the last sentence is Barrés’s own. Since unlike Lawrence and Hogarth (whose book The Wandering Scholar is the wholly informative and unromantic record of two trips to the Levant in 1896 and 1910%') he writes of a world of distant probabilities; he is more prepared to imagine the Orient as going its own way. Yet the bond (or leash) between East and West that he advocates. is designed to permit a constant variety of intellectual pressure going from West to East. Barrés sees things, not in terms of waves, battles, spiritual adventures, but in terms of the cultivation of intellectual imperialism, as ineradicable as it is subtle. The British vision, exemplified. by Lawrence, is of the mainstream Orient, of peoples, political organizations, and movements guided ane pin in check Dy. the White Man’s expert tutelage; the Orient is ” Orient, “our” people, “our” dominions. Discriminations peels elites and the_masses are Jess likely to_be made by the British than by the French, whose perceptions and Policy were always based~on minorities and on the insidious pressures _ of spiritual community between France a and its. colonial children. The