Chapter Xiv. the Growth of Humanity

The need of a basis of right sentiments even greater than that of improved political machinery to secure international union. We must start from patriotism and enlighten and enlarge it. Of the three Western nations which lead in the arts and sciences, France and England through the war become closely allied in defence of a policy of the union of free and pacific people throughout the world. The position of Italy, Russia, and the United States. The increase of arbitral methods and the formation of leagues of peace or even of a world-state are matters calling for earnest thought; but the spread of the notion of humanity, the co-operation of all mankind in a common work is more fundamental and may be begun by any one at home. This idea, starting with the Stoics, is fully developed with the advent of modern science. It shows itself in many forms and the spread of exact science is its most powerful aid. This is entirely independent of nationality and will be increasingly concerned with the alleviation of human suffering and the improvement of life.

The final test of a high international aim is the joint effort of the stronger peoples to protect and assist the weaker and less advanced. The case of Africa and the Brussels Conference of 1889. Analogy with the treatment of the young at home.

THE GROUNDS OF UNITY

In face of the greatest tragedy in history, it is to history that we make appeal. What does it teach us to expect as the issue of the conflict? How far and in what form may we anticipate that the unity of mankind, centring as it must round Europe, will emerge from the trial?

Only two occasions occur to the mind on which, since the break up of the Roman Empire, a schism so serious as the present has threatened the unity of the Western world. The first was the Reformation and the war which it entailed down to the Peace of Westphalia. The second was the struggle against Napoleon, terminated a hundred years ago. The latter was in many respects a closer parallel. It was a struggle of the independent nations of Europe against the overweening ambition and aggression of one Power. It united them in an alliance which achieved its purpose and survived the successful issue of the war for some years. Some such course, with a comity of nations far wider and more enduring than the Holy Alliance as its sequel, we hope and predict for the present war.

The struggle at the Reformation was less like the present, either in its causes or its course, but it has some features which make it a useful point for a survey of the permanent unifying elements which hold and will hold the West together in spite of occasional cataclysms and the clash of rival interests and passion. A man like Erasmus, trembling before the catastrophe, willing to make immense sacrifices to avoid an open breach, uncertain of any final readjustment which might restore the harmony of the world, was not unlike some among us who hoped against hope that the enemy might be appeased, who thought that almost any peace was better than any war, who still fear that the breach in unity is vital or irreparable for generations.

And the issue three hundred years ago may also inspire us with a cautious optimism, a strong though not unmeasured trust. The right cause triumphed, fully in the end. Freedom was secured, both for churches and for individuals, throughout the world. The evil features in the papal system, against which the attack was really levelled, quietly but completely disappeared, and the institution survived, itself reformed. Before a hundred years were out the world had moved on to the conquest of new vantage points and the establishment of a wider unity on a firmer base.

Both previous occasions are therefore full of hope. The European system is, as we shall see throughout these essays, the necessary nucleus of any civilized order embracing the whole world; and the great convulsions which have hitherto continued to occur in it from time to time are moments of especial value for the study of the conditions under which it exists. They are the pathological experiences which reveal the strength and the weaknesses of the normal functions. We strive and hope for a more lasting state of general health, and do not despair of the patient even in this grave attack. He has survived even more serious illness. For though the present war is the most gigantic that the world has ever seen, its very greatness is the result of some of those modern developments--scientific skill, improved communications, national cohesion--on which ultimately the better organization of the whole commonwealth of nations will be built. Passi graviora; we have weathered the storms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the old Roman order and its sequel in the Catholic Church were at their weakest and the recuperative power of science and social reform and nationalism had hardly begun its work. We shall not fail with our greater forces of the present to regain and create a Europe freer, stronger, and more united than that which now seems to be shaken to the depths.

The process of gaining a greater unity among the leading nations of the world, like all the aspects of human evolution, must be regarded from two points of view, distinct in theory, inextricable in life. What does the nature of man itself demand? How has this nature expressed itself, and been affected in history by the external conditions, the geography, climate, conflict and commingling of races, which the theatre of its appearance has imposed?

Looked at in itself, so far as we can isolate it from its surroundings, man's nature is distinguished from that of lower animals by two features, both of them essentially social and tending to unity. He is more deeply and permanently attached to members of his own species, by affection, sympathy, veneration, tradition, than any other creature. And he is a reasoning being, reason itself requiring the contact and agreement of various minds. The incomparably greater force which he has acquired in the world, over all other species and over nature itself, is due to the working of these two factors. At starting he was physically less strong than many other creatures, and if he fought with others of his own kind, other animal species did the same. He was ahead of them by his reason, and reason acted, and must act, through the concert of thinking beings. This concert is not merely, or even mainly, an attachment among those living at the same time to co-operate for some common end; it is with man a conscious sequence of one generation on another. Sometimes the movement of adaptation is slower, sometimes quicker, but in every case the living are carrying on the work of the dead, and their co-operation in time as well as space is due to the working of the same qualities of attachment and reason, the social factors, by which at any moment a community of men is bound together.

Still looking at the matter a priori, it is clear that the vast community of mankind, though it has come more closely in contact in recent years over all the planet, yet acts, and must act, habitually and momentarily, through many smaller aggregates. Of these the leading types are the family and the country or nation. The former is not directly relevant to our inquiry, the latter plays a leading part in it. The former is less dependent on external conditions of land-formation and the like, and is in consequence more universal, more purely human. The latter has been shaped by geographical conditions, by racial qualities, by the apparent accidents of history. Its relation to the larger units of human society raises the most difficult, fundamental and unavoidable questions. To curb aggressive nationalism is the root-problem of the present war. To reconcile permanently nationalism with humanity would be to establish the everlasting peace.

Western society, indeed the whole community of mankind, is built up of these smaller units, the family and the nation, with their various intermediate groupings, but the historical process has by no means conformed at all exactly to this logical order. Society has not been made in orderly fashion by forming families and then combining families to make hundreds, and hundreds to make counties, and counties nations, and so on to the whole. A German god might have done this, but the way of nature and history was less perfect. The minor forms of human association have been taking shape, being altered and on the whole improved, throughout the process. At one point, of high importance for our argument, a larger form of association was achieved before the necessary constituent elements were articulated. This was the Greco-Roman world encircling the Mediterranean and completed in the Roman Empire of the second century A.D. It was the nucleus from which the Western world of modern civilization has been developed; yet it was there, settled in its main outlines, before the national units which it required for internal harmony and cohesion had taken any definite shape. It is to the difficulties of their growth and mutual adjustment that we owe most of the conflicts of modern history.

We shall in this book go back first to a still earlier stage, a stage of pre-history, to a time when no one, not gifted with superhuman insight and prescience, could have foreseen the course which human civilization would pursue. All over the world, for tens of thousands of years, a culture persisted, associated with stone implements, and marked by a similarity which is often extremely striking, in races and tribes widely severed by distance and climatic conditions. The raw material of the human product in science, art, and invention was alike in texture although often exuberant in detail and imagination. But it had not yet the unity of an organic whole, knit by a common purpose and conscious of itself.

To gain the cohesion of large numbers of men by whom wealth could be created and sufficient leisure and independence secured for an intellectual life, not dictated by the necessities of existence, a special concurrence of favourable physical conditions was required. The rich and secluded river-basins of many parts of the world provided this, and in consequence we find similar large communities arising at the end of the Stone Age in such places as China, Peru, Mexico, and above all in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The last named derived their special importance for the sequel from their proximity to the Mediterranean, which was to act as the great meeting-place and training-school for adventurous spirits and inquiring minds. From the busy intercourse of these land-locked waters arose the civilization called Minoan, or Aegean, centring in Crete, itself to be surpassed by the trading activity of the Phoenicians and the art and science of the Greeks.

It is with the advent of the Greek that the seal is placed upon the claim of the Mediterranean to be the birthplace of the highest type of human civilization, the centre from which a unity of the spirit was to spread, until, by material force as well as by the conquering mind, the European or Western man was recognized as in the forefront of the race. The supremacy of the Greek lay in his achievement in three directions, as a thinker, as an artist, and as the builder of the city-state. For our present purpose the first and the last are the most important and the first the most important of all.

The city-state was important as the first example of a free, self-governing community in which the individual realized his powers by living--and dying--with and for his fellows. This new type of human community was of the highest moment in the sequel. In many points it was a model to the Romans, and thus became a fulcrum for the upward movement of the Western world. In the works, too, of the Greek philosophers, especially of Plato and Aristotle, it inspired the earliest and some of the deepest reflections on the nature of social life and government. But it never acquired the permanence of the political units needed to build up the European Commonwealth. For this nations were required, and the Greeks were a race and not a nation. The [Greek: polis] lacked the size, the variety of elements, and the territorial basis on which a modern nation rests.

It is rather in their achievements as thinkers and as artists, above all in their science and philosophy, that we find the most fundamental and lasting contribution of the Greeks to the unity and progress of mankind. When these became allied to the tenacity, the organizing and legal genius of the Romans, a firm centre of civilized life was established, which has survived the shocks of two thousand years of growth and conflict and will survive the upheaval of the present. The Greek unification was in the world of thought and art; the Roman attempted a corresponding work of organization in the human world which lay nearest to him in the countries round the Mediterranean Sea. Both efforts were of priceless value and continuing effect, but both were, from the conditions of the problem, imperfect solutions, the brilliant but precocious sketches of adolescent genius. The Greek, working at first on the material accumulated by generations of Chaldean and Egyptian priests, discovered from their crude, unorganized, and inexact observations of geometry and astronomy the elements of unity in diversity which constitute science. Inquiring for causes, comparing and correcting individual facts, he arrived at the first equations in mathematics, the first laws of nature. His work in this sphere and in that of medicine went on continuously until after the Roman occupation of the Mediterranean world was complete. It died out gradually in the theological atmosphere of Alexandria, and on the purely human side ended in Stoicism with an amalgam of universal philosophy and Roman law. The Stoic Empire of the second century A.D. was the high-water mark of the joint efforts of Greeks and Romans to attain unity and humanism in thought and practice. Its brilliance while it lasted the nobility of its leading men, the persistence of the main lines of its structure, are the measure of our debt to the builders of the Greco-Roman world.

The Roman contribution to the result which in the end so perfectly combined both movements was, in its origin and nature, singularly unlike the Greek. The Roman did not analyse his conceptions. He accepted what came to him, either from his ancestors or from other peoples, without scrutiny, except so far as to see that new matter could be worked into old forms without a dislocation in practice. He was the pragmatist, the Greek the idealist. This instinct of adaptation and sequence made the Roman the pioneer in law as the Greek was the pioneer in science. It rendered possible the holding together in one political system of the multifarious territories and peoples from the Tigris to the Solway Firth for long enough to enable the greater part of that area to be permanently civilized on Roman lines. But, like the artist's sketch of his picture, the whole was outlined before the parts were worked out in their final form; and the sketch itself was seriously imperfect in more than one point. The set-back which Augustus received on the eastern side of the Rhine was never made good, and the Germanic tribes therefore remained un-Romanized until the Church in the seventh and eighth centuries resumed the work on other lines. This defeat of Varus and the legend of Hermann became to the German a symbol of national greatness in a sense which none of the other national conflicts with Rome ever assumed. To us Boadicea is a barbarian, and we trace with gratitude and pleasure the signs of civilization left by the Roman occupation. To us the Roman was for centuries a defence against barbarism, and we regret that we had to do over again many of the things which he had once taught us. But the Roman Empire, when the German accepted it, was no longer the Empire which had founded the unity of Europe. It was a German Empire, and though the ancient world fired his imagination, he always saw it through German eyes.

The next stage in unity was the mediaeval Church, which inherited the framework of the Roman Empire and extended the area of moral and civilized life which Rome had initiated.

In this Germany was included, and she played a distinguished part. Roman missionaries, some by way of England and Ireland, went further than the Roman legions had attempted, and the sword of Charlemagne did the rest. Germany in the later Middle Ages was perhaps the most valued of all the Pope's domains, and her prince-bishops his greatest lieutenants. The moral and religious effect of the Catholic discipline, appealing to sides of human nature which Greece and Rome had left untouched, was nowhere more deeply felt than by the Germans. Spiritually they were thus lifted at least to the level of the rest of Western Europe, but politically they remained unincorporated, the most feudal and military nation of the West.

The growth of nations was, on the political side, the main achievement of the Middle Ages. Rome had given the framework of a great system, and into this had poured barbarians from North and East, Goths, Franks, Huns, Moors, Lombards, tribes at the level of the Homeric Greeks when they swept down to the Aegean. They came as migrant hordes, and in the area civilized by Rome and the Catholic Church they settled down as nations, mingling with the earlier population and divided up by the geographical configurations of the Continent. Among them France and England had the advantage. They gained their unity as nations earlier than any other countries of the West--England in a form which has lasted substantially unaltered for six hundred years. Spain, which had been torn asunder by the Moors, was not consolidated fully till the end of the fifteenth century, in time to send the last of the crusaders under Columbus in quest of fresh worlds to conquer across the Atlantic. But Italy and Germany--and especially the latter--remained disintegrated until our own time. Both gained their union about the same time, fifty years ago, but by different methods and in a different spirit. Italy, naturally a compact geographical unit, was welded by a democratic enthusiasm, of which Cavour and Mazzini were the soul and Garibaldi the right arm. Germany, vast in power and numbers, lay strongly entrenched in the central area of the Continent, but failed to kindle into national life at the same democratic moment. She was fashioned into political existence by a Thor's hammer, which, as it rose and fell, dealt shattering blows on friends as well as foes, in Austria as well as France, on Danes and Poles, on Liberals and Socialists, on little kings and great ecclesiastics. And now this Frankenstein creation among states offers the most serious problem in adjusting national claims with European unity. We have to check and to assimilate--if the world is to live as one--the one Power which has hitherto developed most persistently and successfully its own resources, but least in subordination to the interests of the whole.

There are those who would regard all national barriers and organization as somewhat of an obstruction, who would prefer a simple internationalism to the world as we know it, with its pent-up passions and attachments, its constant liability to explosion, its slow progress by tortuous channels towards the larger view and the surer hold. Many reformers, from Plato downwards, have taken up a similar attitude in regard to the smaller institution, the family, which is often found to be an obstruction in the way of short cuts to social utopias at home. Kant's ideal of a cosmopolitan constitution as the goal of all human effort rather leans to this side of the balance. But a due balance must be kept and the full value both of family and nation maintained against theories or tendencies which would roll us all out into cosmopolitan items. A glance at other elements which go to make up the unity of European society will tend to correct the perspective.

The unity of the Roman Empire was mainly political and military. It lasted for between four and five hundred years. The unity which supervened in the Catholic Church was religious and moral and endured for a thousand. Less binding on one side, it was more searching and pervasive on others, and though now broken, it still remains in full force over many millions of minds, while the Roman political and legal structure has to be sought for in formal institutions which have absorbed its spirit and transformed its letter. But beyond the actual fabric of the Church itself we have the multitude of cognate and derivative institutions which have served the cause of unity in the moral and intellectual sphere. We shall speak later of the more perfect and lasting unity of science. The universities in the Middle Ages and the Renascence tended to the same end, using a material in philosophy and theology which was bound to wear out with the spread of knowledge and the flux of time. But in their prime they succeeded in producing a more complete community of scholars than has perhaps been ever witnessed in Europe before or since. Then as always the realm of the genuine love of truth, or even of honest disputation, was independent of differences of race or political boundaries, and the scholar went from Oxford to Paris, or from Rotterdam to Bologna, solely to widen his mind or to sit at the feet of some world-famous teacher.

And the wandering scholar was by no means the only social link. Many of the trade-routes surprise us by the length and adventurousness of their course. Amber from the Baltic found its way to the south of Italy and Spain, while small boats from Ireland were brought into the mouths of the Loire and the Garonne when the coasts of the Channel were impassable through barbarians from the North.

Mediaeval Europe was, in fact, much more of a unity than the modern traveller would expect, and this was mainly due to the influence of the Church. The spiritual unity went deep on one side of man's nature, and when a man like Erasmus surveyed the prospect at the beginning of the sixteenth century we can well understand his horror, and his determined abstention from any step which would precipitate the break-up of the one organized body which represents the old united culture of Christendom and might check the new forces which were threatening selfishness and disorder in ever-widening circles on the globe. For it must be noted that new forces of expansion were making themselves felt, as the unity of the Church was being threatened from within. Explorers were extending, East and West, the sphere in which the European was to impose his influence for good and evil on other peoples, and the sixteenth century thus becomes one, perhaps the most critical, of all the turning-points in the history of the West. Danger was mixed with hope, disorder with new knowledge and fresh power, and the crisis has not yet been surmounted. But we have gained by now some insight into the nature of the new forces and see that they should, and one day will, work more fully in the direction of unity in the civilized world, of healthy independence in the parts and a growing harmony in the whole. Little of this could have been seen by the observer at the outbreak of the Reformation.

Nationalism, democracy, colonial expansion, religious change, the growth of knowledge and its application to industry and social reform, these are the salient features which distinguish our modern from the mediaeval world, and we have to consider how far they make for the unity of mankind.

The sixteenth century saw both the strengthening of national governments and the beginning of European colonization. England, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, all settled down under a central government stronger and more independent than they had previously enjoyed, and pegged out estates for themselves beyond the seas. In each case wars have been entailed in the process, and, as we know, the backwardness of Germany at this period has been visited upon the rest of Europe tenfold in recent times. National expansion thus appears to be an eminent provocation of international strife. It is with no intention either of ignoring facts or minimizing dangers that one turns here to the other side of the account. Where was the spark actually fired which led to the present conflagration? In that part of Europe where the national units were least stable and developed, where the conditions of government and social order are most remote from our own. Who can doubt that if in the Balkans the Turks had been able to establish even the sort of government we maintain in India, or if, still better, the Balkan States, apart from the Turks, had gained their own independence in a federation like the Swiss, the aggression of the Central Powers would have been checked? The compact, well-established national unit is not in itself a danger, but there is a danger in weak, oppressed, or disjointed nationalities, who have not found safety and offer a bait to their expansive neighbours.

Thus strong and independent nations, as Kant postulates in his Perpetual Peace, are guarantees of peace, stones in the Temple of Humanity. Another consideration not generally recognized, strengthens this conclusion. In recent years all leading and progressive nations have been devoting their first thought to social reform. This has been conspicuously the case with ourselves, with the French, with the United States, with the smaller, more advanced countries in Europe. Germany, too, though her first energies have been given to organizing war, has had in this matter two distinct souls. Her social democrats and part of her governing class have been consistent and successful in working for the amelioration of the condition of the people, and have often anticipated other nations in her process. It is self-evident, first, that a strong national government is needed to carry out wide social reform, second, that in proportion as governments devote themselves whole-heartedly to this, their energies are less likely to be devoted to molesting their neighbours. Germany, unfortunately for herself and the world, had no government which could speak for the whole people and be responsible to it. A truly national government in Germany, or anywhere else, would not have willed this war.

The colonial expansion which was connected with the outburst of national sentiment in the sixteenth century, and has led to frequent conflicts between European nations ever since, also appears in a different light if we study it in view of facts not dreamt of in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Americas, which appeared to the early navigators as rich estates to be cultivated for the benefit of proprietors at home, have developed into powerful and independent countries, eminently pacific (except for internal brawls), looking forward to producing new types of life and government, hoping perhaps to hold the balance in a long-drawn contest of the Old World Powers. The circle, therefore, of the Mediterranean world which was enlarged by the discoveries of the sixteenth century, finds its completion to-day in new states across the Atlantic, which are on the whole enormously preponderant on the side of peace, and wish to hold their own in Western civilization by force of wealth and industry, and not by arms. To us, too, it is clear, and will be one day to the Germanic Powers, that the British Empire, the largest political aggregate on the globe, is essentially a league of free peoples, under no compulsion from the centre, but responsive to attack upon their power or liberty by any third party, strong from their general contentment with the conditions and institutions of their life, and not through any systematic regulations imposed from above. Even India and other protected states and dominions, though not yet self-governing, are moving steadily in the direction of responsibility and of willing association with the British Empire or Commonwealth as a whole.

Such is the much vaster community of nations which has succeeded to the Western Europe of the sixteenth century; and no mention has been made of the place of Russia or the countries still further east. The picture does not suggest a welter of conflicting passions and ambition throughout the world. On the whole a mass of men and women labouring with fair contentment at their daily task, not concerned that their state or nation should extend its boundaries, least of all that it should provoke attack; little conscious of the historic debt of nations to one another, but wishing well to others except when they cross the path of a personal desire; gaining rapidly more sense of actual community among living men, but hardly realizing yet how man's power has been built up in the past and how infinitely it might be advanced and the world improved by harmony and steadily directed efforts in the future. That the sense of brotherhood has gained ground in the world, especially since the middle of the eighteenth century, is certain. Voices of protest reach us even from Germany through the storm of hatred. But the vague sympathy, the desire for peace and shrinking from the horrors of war need to be enlightened, to have a reasoned basis in the belief that all nations, and especially those of the vanguard, are partners in a common work and essential one to another, above all, perhaps, to have institutions which tend to co-operation and make a sudden and disastrous breach as difficult as possible. Many of these instruments of peace were being forged when the war broke out. Many of the most profound ties between nations are not understood or are kept in the background by nationalist teachers or a nationalist press.

Of all the modern steps towards international unity, the most indisputable, the most firmly based and furthest-reaching, is science, and the various applications of science, both in promoting intercourse between different parts of the world and in alleviating suffering and strengthening and illuminating human life. The more prominence, therefore, that we can secure for the growth of science in the teaching of history, the larger place humanity, or the united mind of mankind, will take in the moving picture which every one of us has, more or less full and distinct, of the progress of the world. For some hundreds of years, culminating in the three or four centuries A.D., the dominant feature in the picture was of a triumphant city-state, Rome, gradually subduing and embracing the world. Then for some thousand years the picture was of a religious organization leading the civilized world, and nationalities were only emerging as somewhat dim and ill-defined figures. Then, with the rupture in the Church and the upspringing of other religious bodies and forms of thought, national figures become predominant in the scene, and attract nearly all the attention, which is given, except by a few curious persons, to the study of history. Nationalism, once in defect in Western Europe, has been for some time in excess. The remedy is not directly to attack it, except in the case in which it gave us no choice, but to supply the limiting and controlling ideas. Of all these, science fits the case most exactly, because, as science, it can know no distinction between French or German, English or Russian. There is no French physics or German chemistry, and if we are told that the Prussians have their own theory of anthropology, based on the predominance of a particular type of skull which other anthropologists dispute, we are quite sure that in that case science has not yet said her last word.

We put physical science first because it contains the largest number of certain and accepted laws. The further we get from mathematical exactness the more liable we are to differences of opinion, which may, as in the case of anthropology, cluster round some question of national pique. But it would be easy to trace through all the sciences, and into philosophy and religion, a growing unity of method and result before which national differences often resolve themselves into a difference of style. The style is the nation's, but the truth is mankind's.

We could not, indeed, be sure that if every one in Western Europe were a trained scientist, wars would cease from the earth: certain professors have taught us too well for that. But in so far as men come to recognize that the great body of organized knowledge is a common possession, due to the united efforts of different nations, and that it can only be increased by joint action and may be increased to such a point that the whole of life is a happier and nobler thing, so far they will be averse to war. And in its various applications, to increasing production and quickening communication, to lengthening life and healing sickness, to protecting workers and cheapening food, men see the natural fruits of an activity whose basis is common thought and its ultimate purpose the common good.

It has been said with truth that it is easier to trace the growth of science as a joint product of co-operating minds, than to find a growth of common sentiments among the men and the nations who have created it. True among individuals, it must be at least as true among groups and nations. We may work successfully with some one at a problem or learn from a teacher or a companion when we dislike him personally and do not seek his society apart from the needs of our common work. It has often happened, and will happen again in private and public. But though particular antipathies may increase, the tendency to dislike others is a diminishing quality among civilized men. In the long run common sense and necessity will prevail. We are born to live a while before we die; and we must live on the same planet, sometimes next door to those who have sworn a never-dying hate.

UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES

The new perspective, with all its shift of values, which is forced on us by the war, touches the past no less than the present and the future. However objectively we try to present to ourselves the data of history, we cannot emancipate ourselves from the need to present them from a point of view which must in the last resort be our own. We may bring ourselves by training and criticism nearer to the centre of things, more intimate with essential factors and remote from the trivial periphery; but it is a matter of degree, and historical study an affair after all of mental triangulation. Like a surveyor in the field, we are safest in our determination of any third position if we have already knowledge of two, and of how the third looks from both of them. And even if we were indeed at the centre of things, I suppose we might take our round of angles quite uselessly, unless we had also some divine gift of judging distances.

So the historian accepts his limitations as the rules of the game, and sets out to see unity askance. It is his rare chance, if events shift him, and set him gazing at a world in which, as now, half his own career is inside the picture; not perhaps very easy to find in a moment--as one might fail to recognize oneself in a group-photograph--but none the less there, and intelligible only in relation to its actual surroundings.

Looking back, indeed, over the course of anthropology and prehistoric archaeology, much of which lies in the years since 1870, and nearly all of it since 1815, the first thing which strikes us now is the frequency and delicacy of its response to contemporary thoughts and aspirations. A few of the greatest men have recognized this at the time. I quote from Karl Ernst von Baer, the founder of comparative embryology, and in great matters the master of men as different as Huxley, Spencer, and Francis Balfour. He died in 1876, when political anthropology was still young; but in his great book on Man he 'appeals to the experience of all countries and ages, that if a people has power, and attempts wrongdoing against another, it also does not omit to conceive the other as very worthless and incompetent, and to repeat this conviction often and emphatically' (Der Mensch, ii. 235). It is easy for us to dot the i and cross the t here; less easy perhaps to realize that what troubled von Baer was the persistence of British and American ethnologists in the polygenist heresy, which he traced (and rightly) to their reluctance to treat their 'black brother' as if he were their relative at all. Judgement in that ethnological controversy went by default, with the victory of the North in the American Civil War; and in 1871 the lion lay down with the lamb, even in London; inveterate foes in the Ethnological Society and the Anthropological merging their fate in one Anthropological Institute. In 1915 the reluctance of the 'tall fair people who come from the north'--I borrow a phrase from Professor Ridgeway--to fraternize with mere brunettes, beyond Rhine and Danube, comes in its turn before the same tribunal as polygenism in 1862.

Our subject, 'Unity in Prehistoric Times', embraces three main topics: (1) the unity of human effort and reason everywhere in Man's struggle with Nature and with his Fellow-man; (2) the special conditions which favoured or hindered unity of prehistoric culture in what has been called elsewhere the 'north-west quadrant' of the Old-World land-mass west of Ararat and the Median hills and north of Sahara, the cradle and nursery of the modern 'western world'; and (3) the convergent lines of advancement within that region, which can be traced through the centuries before Roman policy let Greek culture penetrate almost as deep into peninsular Europe as Alexander's conquests had opened to it the inlands of the Near East.

When we speak of unity in human affairs, and particularly just now, when the supreme unity seems to some to be nationalism, and to others the negation, or rather the supersession of nationalism, we mean the rather complex outcome of several distinct things. This complexity was confessed, unwittingly perhaps, in the first humanist creed: 'I believe in one Blood, one Speech, one Cult, one congruous Way of Living.' Modern ethnology, indeed, tends to subsume cult under way-of-living, as a peculiarly delicate test of conformity--and to regard language, alongside of both cult and way-of-living, as another manifestation of the same human reason; distinguishing therefore two kinds of unity--one physical or morphological, as of one animal species in an animal kingdom, the other cultural or psychological, as of the sole incarnate occupant of a realm of mind; and classifying the 'Science of Man' accordingly. But, in essentials, that Athenian creed will serve: our latest ethnologists, and statesmen too, are faced with the same league of problems.

THE UNITY OF MANKIND AS AN ANIMAL SPECIES

Whatever Greek statesmen thought about the gulf between Greek and Persian, or Greek and Barbarian generally, Greek ethnologists raised no fundamental barrier between the different sorts of Man. Good naturalists as they were, and experienced breeders of farm-stock, they accepted white, brown, and black men; and were prepared to accept any other breed that Nearchus or Pytheas might confront them with, as members of one brotherhood, just as they accepted white, brown, or black sheep, with horns of Ammon or with none. Eratosthenes, most philosophical, and therewith most political of them all, was bred in Cyrene, where some Greeks seem to have been black; and he worked in Alexandria, where the University was a human Zoo like that of London or Berlin. Their simple farmer's theory of natural selection attributed 'scorched-faced' Aethiopians to sunburn, and other racial types to large factors of region and régime. The classical treatise is that of Hippocrates 'On Air, Water, and Places'.

In the modern world, too, no serious doubt was cast on the specific unity of mankind, handed down from antiquity, until Linnaeus and Buffon had refined upon the biological notions of genus and species (for both of which there is only one word in Greek), and had defined species by the criterion of fertility. Now not only the great explorers, but every ship's captain, knew by this time that white men, at all events, would form fertile unions with all known kinds of humanity. But in the eighteenth century it became known also, and in the same empirical way, that the fertility of unions between white men and black was imperfect; and as this was the only human cross for which there was any large quantity of evidence, the impression grew that the zoological distance between these races was greater than had been supposed. On the other hand, eighteenth-century formulators of the 'Rights of Man' challenged reconsideration of the current practice of negro slavery; and the upshot was a controversy. Abolitionists contended that the 'black brother' was indeed a blood brother, and entitled to the 'Rights of Man'; their opponents replied that the negro, being (as they held) of another species, might justly be treated in all respects as one of white man's domestic animals, and be his property as well as his drudge. At the turn of the century, the adherence of Cuvier gave prestige to Polygenesis on its scientific side: and it took all the reasonableness of Prichard in the next generation to turn the tide even in England. But the issue of the American Civil War, to which reference has already been made, coincided so closely in time with the work of Darwin and Lyell on the real meaning of species and on the antiquity of man, that the controversy was closed without bitterness. The new phase of Polygenism which seems now to be opening, with successive discoveries of the quaternary stratification of races, and Keith's analysis of the family tree of the Hominidae, starts from wholly different data, unembarrassed by fears or hopes of a 'Neanderthal' origin for the Negro, or for any living or recent Homo.

The 'human family' then seems re-established as something more than a platform phrase; and separatists (who are always with us) have had to fall back upon another criterion of disunity.

THE UNITY OF MANKIND AS A RATIONAL ANIMAL

Omitting language for a moment (which since first telling of the 'Tower of Babel' story has somewhat fallen from grace as a symptom of unity among mankind), or rather, subsuming it as one of the most essential exhibitions of rationality, and indeed its chief instrument, we come to Man's unity as a creature possessed of reason, and expressing this reasoning habit in specific modes of living, under whatever external surroundings. These being almost infinitely various, it is not always easy to compare examples of Man's reaction to them. For proof of the uniformity of human reasoning, indeed, we have to begin almost from an animal plane. 'Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Christian is?' And not only is men's hunger, and their sensitiveness to 'the same summer and winter' similar: their ways of satisfying hunger, their conduct of the food-quest, their elementary organizations 'for the sake of maintaining life', as Aristotle expressed it, exhibit one mental type throughout. In the domestication of nature's gifts it is the same: in the fashioning of implements and weapons, the improvisation of clothing and shelter, the almost instinctive impulse to 'play with fire' which repels other animals. Style and finish may vary, and do vary widely from one province of culture to another; but in their last mechanical analysis, a spade is a spade all the world over, and a celt a celt.

It was the service of the late General Pitt-Rivers in this country, and of Klemm more laboriously abroad, to establish this aspect of the 'Evolution of Culture' beyond controversy: as it was the work of Boucher de Perthes, and of Sir John Evans and Sir John Lubbock to proceed in the reverse direction, from a criterion of utility to a hypothesis of design, and the conclusion that certain stones, of reputedly prehuman antiquity, must be the work of human hands, geared to human brains like ours. Tylor's wider range of observation, conspicuously supplemented by other work of Lubbock, embraced all human activities in one formula of comparison, which is indeed as old as Thucydides. We can infer, that is, something about early stages of an advanced culture from the present-day practices of savagery.

Yet, across this 'primitive culture', to use a phrase which has become classical, so reasonable, and therewith so full of uniformities, in its intimate interplay of hand and tongue with brain, patches of shadow fall; a chaos of such incredible absurdities and (in the widest sense) of 'barbarities', that the charitable hypothesis that here and there man has lost his way and just stopped thinking hardly seems adequate to account for things, and writers like Lévy-Bruhl are provoked to the pessimist guess that there can be a savage logic which is different from ours and yet is 'logical' in some coherent sense; which stets verneint the conclusions, and even the axioms, which are clear as day to us; and is a 'knowledge of evil' side by side with the knowledge of good.

But examples of this 'primitive thought', when we come to analyse them, all seem to resolve themselves into one or other of the ordinary sorts of fallacy, as our own logic-books expound them. If the study of them proves anything at all, it is the familiar aphorism that, while there is only one right way of doing and thinking, there are countless ways of going wrong. Among the most reasonable people (at their highest) that the world has yet seen, there were some of the worst miscarriages of reason and of morals; and throughout their great centuries there was no word either for the devil or for sin in their language. For the Greek all human wrongdoing came under the one simple category of [Greek: hamartia], 'making a mistake', or better 'making a miss'. It is the slang of target-practice, for the correlative [Greek: otochazein], used of all happy guesses at truth, is likewise only the word for 'aiming straight'.

But why make mistakes? Why these failures of co-ordination between design and execution, between nature's truth and man's theory and practice? Why this declining from the best into sloppy or antiquated work, to name only two main sorts of technological fallacy? Again the answer comes down, past Lucretius, from the Ionian physicist. It is only in superficial appearance that 'though reason is common to all, most men live as if they had a way of thinking of their own', Heraclitus' momentary despair anticipating Lévy-Bruhl almost verbally. Once penetrate, with Heraclitus himself, below the surface, and 'all men have it in them to understand themselves and to think straight'. It is failure to think, not some distinct and illogical sort of thinking, that is the cause of the trouble: the lapse of that 'organized common sense' which is the content of all 'science'.

Such disorganization of common sense, 'idiotic' thinking, in the Heraclitan sense of an [Greek: idia phronêsis], can be as cumulative, fallacy on fallacy, and as elaborately wrong, as the fabric of knowledge is cumulatively and elaborately right. 'Hath this man sinned, or his parents, that he was born blind?' That is the tragedy of primitive culture: for the brains are there and the eyes; only they have never seen anything straight, because in the world they were bred up in there was nothing left straight to be seen.

Lucretius hit upon half the trouble when he referred the organized absurdities of his contemporaries to hereditary fear: which in the last analysis is a derangement of the higher activities extending to abdication. Its onset is an ataxy; and its culmination a paralysis. In its mental aspect it is failure of the Will-to-know; acceptance of an inferiority to which ignorance consigns us.

The other half of the trouble, less clearly diagnosed by Lucretius, but detected, as we have seen, by Heraclitus, is hereditary pride, based on ignorance no less than is Lucretian fear. It is the 'lie-in-the-soul', the conviction, assailed by Socrates and before his time as well as after, that we know how things stand, when in fact we do not. Like fear, in its mental aspect, it is a failure of the Will-to-know; once again, an acceptance of the inferior status of the ignorant.

Organized fears, then, lead to tabu, the systematic inhibition of experiment which might conflict with hypothesis; and organized pride, to magic, with its systematic disregard of the results of each experiment that is made, when it does so conflict with hypothesis. And it is these two superstructures of ignorance, inhibiting and insisting by turns, which add the glamour of irrationality to so much of the behaviour of mankind, and disguise its native rationalism and its morality too. Beset by fear and pride, craftsman and cultivator and explorer and reformer alike are in the same predicament. 'I could do this or that and do it thus, but may I?' and if such opinion as counts says 'Thou shalt not', the fallacious substitution of 'shalt not' for 'mayst' cannot fail to endanger advancement. It may be over the chipping of a flint axe, or a trade-union rule about a high-speed lathe; but if the craftsman conforms to opinion as such, and not through positive concurrence of his own judgement with it, he has accepted the fallacious conclusion as his own, and lets his work fall to second-hand and to second-best.

Wide uniformities of conduct and of material culture may therefore result from ignorance, no less than from knowledge, and unless we have very full acquaintance with the region and external conditions, it is not easy to decide whether any one of these uniformities is wisely uniform or not. The record of the dealings of quite well-meaning conquerors with the institutions and arts of their subjects is full of tragedies of this kind. I call to mind an example in Paraguay, where abstention from infanticide, after conversion to Christianity, nearly wrought the extinction of a native tribe, for the population at once began to exceed the means of subsistence; and it was only when the committee in London was induced (just in time) to apply mission funds to the purchase of seeds and implements of agriculture that the danger was averted. It is not my purpose here to commend infanticide; only to indicate that while man cannot live by bread alone, he cannot go on living, even a good life, if he really falls short of bread. So with devotion to an ideal unity of culture, we are to combine toleration of wide diversity, seeing how diverse are the surroundings which make up the Home of Man. Were Nature uniform, in a geographical sense, from pole to pole, civilization might be practically as well as ideally one, though it may fairly be doubted whether in such a world civilization, such as we know, would arise; but with the present distribution of land and water, temperature and rainfall, and the complex of plants and animals which results from their interaction, unity among the phenomena of culture ceases to be practicable, and it has become hard for some (as we have seen) even to keep their faith in the unity of human reason.

It was not, in fact, till a rather later stage in the growth of science, either in the old world, or in our own, that anyone troubled himself about the existence of such unity at all. That men of alien blood should behave in alien and incomprehensible ways seemed to the Greek and to the navigators of the Renaissance equally natural. And Herodotus and Bodin, to name only pioneers and masters, are agreed as to the cause. Variety in Man's behaviour is no impish trick of original sin: it is the response of his single reason to variety in Nature. Only when experience added intimacy with alien individuals to observations of their habits of life, did a common humanity in their behaviour begin to be so frequent and obvious as to cause surprise. Acquiescence in the discovery is implicit in Thucydides and Hobbes, and confessed in Aristotle and Locke. Had Europe broken into the Great East in Locke's day, as the Greeks broke into Persia in Aristotle's, we might have had completer analogy between the ethnology of Montesquieu and that of Eratosthenes than we can actually trace. The defect in the writer of the Lettres Persanes is in his knowledge of Persia, not of Paris and London: Eratosthenes, as we remember, was born in Cyrene and worked in Alexandria.

MAN IN CONFLICT WITH NATURE IN THE NORTH-WEST QUADRANT OF THE OLD WORLD

We come now, from this rather general survey of human faculty, to the more pertinent question, what sort of unity do we find in human achievement within that region, or rather within those regions, of the Old World where the stream-heads of our modern culture seem to take their rise? The qualification which has slipped from my pen is half the answer already, for we are to deal not with one homogeneous region but with a cluster of regions in all climates from Arctic tundra to Sahara and the Nile, and in all altitudes from alpine to maritime. Unity of prehistoric culture, in such conditions, can at best be but a question of degree.

Modern ethnology, emancipated from a belief in an immediate consanguinity of mankind, by the spread of less infantile views about Noah's Ark, goes on to question the sufficiency of language as a bond of union, and forthwith stumbles over the Tower of Babel.

Two contemporary lines of discovery have tended to determine the result. Geology gives us a very long margin of time since the north-west quadrant began to be reinhabited by human beings after the Ice Age, and assumed approximately its present distribution of land and water. Archaeology, which in this aspect is the special stratigraphy of man, sanctions an extension of time, since not merely human beings but organized societies of men made their appearance in Europe, which far exceeds the period required, or commonly assumed, for the spread of any known Indo-European language, from any possible 'home' to any region where it was spoken at the beginning of historic time. And not only does archaeological evidence enable us to detect such societies sedentary for a while on this or that site over the face of Europe and its neighbourhood; it traces not merely one 'prehistoric culture', but a number of distinct types of such culture, each with its own geographical distribution, and with distributions which expand and contract at different times, superseding one type of culture here, and another there, and in turn superseded by others.

It is not easy to bring home the extent of this diversity to those who are not familiar with the physical condition of a Europe which was as yet largely in the 'backwood' stage of exploitation. But it will give some idea of the range of contrast, if we revert to the method of Thucydides, and compare the unexploited Europe of the days before agriculture, with unexploited America at the time of its discovery by Europeans. Here, within the same geographical limits of the north temperate zone, and with the far simpler scheme of surface relief which characterizes the New World, we have civilizations as different as those of the Eskimo, the Algonkin peoples of the coniferous forests, the Huron and Iroquois of the deciduous hardwoods, horticultural Muscogeans in the south-east, buffalo-hunting Sioux on the prairie, predatory Apaches and Blackfeet in the foothills, and littoral and riparian fisher-folk on the Pacific slope: just as recognizable now, in their distributions and overlaps, by the fashions of their pipe-bowls and other débris, as are the representatives of the 'row-grave' culture or the makers of 'band-keramik' in Central Europe.

Keeping in mind this analogy of prehistoric Europe with pre-Columbian North America, let us classify the problems of subsistence which these Old World regions offered to prehistoric man; and consider, granting him all the reason in the world, and uniform physique (if you please) as well, how he is to formulate solutions which shall show any trace of uniformity, and yet be solutions for him of the one Protean problem, how to sustain life here and now?

Along the Arctic seaboard, homogeneous from Behring Strait nearly to the North Cape, we have the frozen tundra region, with a characteristic tundra culture; pushed now far north since Europe mellowed into a habitable world, but formerly widespread about the skirts of the shrinking ice-sheet. Here we hunt large animals and sea-shore beasts, and trap small-deer very ingeniously; we fish in the large northward-flowing rivers; and eventually (heaven knows after how long, or how far back from now) we borrowed a notion, probably from pastorals imprudently straying too far along those northward river-lanes through the forests, and domesticated our best of beasts, the reindeer; stealing a march here on our Alaskan cousins, who call them caribou and treat them so: they had no pastorals on the prairie southward to teach them otherwise, and when the Russians came and brought reindeer over from Asia, the silly fellows turned them loose and hunted them till they had eaten them all.

South of the tundra, the Great Northern Woodland encircles the planet, interrupted only by the treeless sea. Here too we hunt, and trap, and eat berries of the undergrowth, like Algonkins or Tacitean Germans, many of whom had no more skill in cattle than Algonkins. But we have not the place to ourselves, like the tundra folk and the Algonkins. Our forest world is in ever-present danger of disintegration, and our wood-craft with it. Fond folk with tame animals (poor sport, both of them, for sportsmen like us) come blundering in off the parkland away south, up the grassy glades, trampling undergrowth and scaring the game. People are saved from all that 'over there', because no one can tame the prairie buffalo and drive him over the hunting grounds; some sport, too, the prairie buffalo! And worse still, there are the people who come hacking and burning our great trees, and tearing up the turf and underwood, and all to plant their fancy grasses with the fat seeds, that the deer like to browse over; and that is the only thing to make those people show fight, if we or the deer go among their fat-grass plots. Those people come up, too, from the south and the south-east, and have to go back thither for seed if their sowings fail. Of course they like their animals tame, like the other fellows; but the grasses are their first string, as we bow-men say.

Southward, enveloping the Alpine ridges, except where the snow peaks perforate its carpet covering, the Woodland changes its character, rather than gives place to anything fresh along the shores of the Lake Region of the Old World. Here and there, in detached plateaux enfolded among the ranges (like the Salt Lake basin and the Shoshonean plateaux in America), there are isolated grassy plains, repeating on a smaller scale the great grassland which skirts the Black Sea and the Caspian. Examples are the heart of Spain and of Asia Minor, and the miniature grasslands of the Balkan Peninsula, such as Thessaly and Eastern Thrace.

It is in the southern third, or thereabouts, of the continuous Woodland, where the deciduous forest trees begin to give place to evergreens, as they themselves replaced the conifers further north, that the minutely subdivided horticulture and arboriculture begins, which characterize the Mediterranean region. To call it agriculture would be to exaggerate its scale. It is more like a northerly extension of tropical Hackbau, as the Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with plough and spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more than earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which the Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen work their Virgilian plough through the recesses of a field no bigger than a cabbage-patch, and well stocked with olive-trees besides, to realize how truly in this kind of farming the ox is in place of a house-slave to a poor man. For the house-slave could handle a zappa, the spadelike Levantine hoe, where an ox would fail to turn round, yet where food-plants could be coaxed to grow, and an olive-tree would luxuriate.

This kind of garden-cultivation indeed repeats very closely the foodquest of the Muskogean cultivators in the South-eastern States, who make up the so-called 'civilized tribes' and, almost alone among the Redskins, 'are all self-supporting and prosperous'. In the Old World, as in the New, its distribution is closely defined by certain limits of rainfall and temperature, and most of all by the extent to which the rainfall is concentrated into a few winter months, so that a dry warm summer is assured, which Man can mitigate and even exploit if he has access to perennial water. It extended, therefore, in quite early times, and still predominates, all round the mountainous shores of the Mediterranean, from Syria by Southern Europe to Algeria and Tunis, and penetrates inland and upland into the forests till summer clouds and rainfall check it. In this region of its distribution Greek and Roman legends betray the belief that grain-cultivation came late, and superseded a staple diet of tree produce, chestnut, walnut, filbert, and acorn. And when the 'nobler grasses' came, it was barley and red wheat that predominated, as indeed they predominate still.

But this is only one part of the distribution of the garden-culture. Far north along the Atlantic seaboard, and as far inland as the mild Atlantic climate is perceptible, the same type prevails. Its ancient limit is traced meteorologically in Tacitus' complaints (for example) of the austerity of the lands beyond the Rhine. In this northern region grain crops pass from red to white wheat, from barley to oats, and from both to rye. The ease with which the Muskogean potato and tomato have been acclimatized, and their respective prevalence now in the Atlantic and Mediterranean sections, illustrate exactly the place which primitive hoe-culture held in the economy of the Old-World region. Early monuments of this culture, in which hoe and ox-plough are equally conspicuous, are the 'meraviglie' rock-carvings above Ventimiglia. The fine flower of it is the Minoan civilization of the Crete and the South Aegean. Egyptian agriculture is also in great part hoe-work.

South-eastward, outside the Carpathians, and within them also, in the great plain of Hungary, we meet a totally different régime; vast featureless and treeless grasslands, extending past the Black Sea and Caspian to the foot of the mountains of North Persia and the spurs of the Central Asian highlands. Here, if Man is to maintain himself at all, he must be master of tame animals which can eat the grass, and in turn sustain him. South of the eastward continuation of the woodland Mountain Zone, through Asia Minor into Persia, and also south of the Mediterranean lake-region and the ridges of Syria and the 'Africa Minor' of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco, which partly enclose it, lies another group of grasslands, Arabia and Sahara, desert-hearted, but capable of sustaining a considerable population of nomad pastoral folk round their margins and in oases, and of emitting them in volcanic emigrations now and then.

From the human point of view, the profound difference between the northern and the southern group of these grasslands, which collectively lie athwart the great east-and-west mountain zone of the Old World, is this. The southern grassland sustains sheep and goats almost exclusively; it acquired its domesticated horses recently (at earliest about 2000 B.C.) and from the north-east; and it relies, for transport, on camels and asses, not on wheeled vehicles. The northern, on the other hand, has sufficient perennial pasture to permit of oxen; it uses horses habitually; and it has utilized the timber of its parkland margin, where it passes over into the northern forest, to construct wheeled carts and ox-ploughs. Equipped with these fundamental implements of civilization, wheel-borne nomads have penetrated the Mountain Zone from the north again and again, introducing the cart into Egypt rather late, and perhaps even into Babylonia; though with these exceptions no secondary centre of cart-folk was ever established in the south. Obvious reasons for this failure lie in the scarcity of parkland and of perennial pasture for large cattle. At best, Assyria and Syria adopted the horsed chariot for war; but these regions, like the Hittite chariot-users of Asia Minor, the Achaean conquerors of the Greek peninsula, and the Gauls in West-Central Europe, are rather within the parkland fringes of the Mountain Zone, and among those intermont plateaux which we have noted already, than borderers of the Grassland itself. In particular, they are all sedentary, and stand in this respect contrasted with the migratory Scythian cart-folk in the northern Grassland. The only nomad cart-folk within the Mountain Zone are the Gipsies, and they seem mainly to have formed their habit of life in the largest intermont plateau of all, the vast table-land of Persia.

The plough is less easy to trace. All that can be safely said at present is that it is a device for applying the strength of large cattle to break up the soil for a grain crop, deeply and uniformly, and above all more rapidly than a man can dig it with a hoe. By his own effort a man can barely break up enough ground to supply his home with grain, except in irrigated land. With the simplest of ploughs he can do this and more, and yet have leisure for other pursuits within the ploughing season. But it is not yet clear in what region ploughing first began. Probably it was in the comparatively well-watered and well-wooded margin of one of the large grasslands; but whether north or south of the Mountain Zone, or round the discontinuous plateaux within it, is not clear. The presumption of large cattle favours the north, yet Babylonia, and even Egypt, had large cattle from very early times. North Syria seems to dispute with Babylonia priority in the production of wheat. Somewhere in this region we may provisionally place the cradle of what I may perhaps describe as the Bread-and-Cheese culture, in which the staple foods are provided by grain-plants and cattle, the latter being valued for their strength and their milk products, but not primarily for their flesh.

Disseminated westward, the Bread-and-Cheese culture is found to suffer regional modification. Southward, among the Mediterranean evergreen flora and old hoe-cultivation, the dearth of summer grass makes the large cattle useless for milking, as well as for beef; they are bred exclusively for draught, as their gait and structure show, and while cheese is supplied by the sheep and goats, butter and animal-fats are replaced by the vegetable oils, of which the olive is the chief, a characteristic Mediterranean product, evergreen, deep-rooted against summer drought, and fleshy-fruited. A Bread-and-Olive culture results, familiar to all visitors to Mediterranean lands. In the deciduous forests of South-Central Europe there is grass in the clearings, and milk enough; but goats and sheep are restricted, as the undergrowth becomes deeper and denser, and the prime giver of fats is the forest-bred pig: in a land rolling with ham and sausages we reach the Bread-and-Bacon culture. Further afield still, and later, in proportion as the forest is opened out by semi-pastoral folk, the moister summer permits open meadow-land, with perennial grass, and the possibility of hay. Here too the grain crops may be so large that there is something over to fatten stock; and to Bread and Cheese the farmer of the north-western plains adds Beef. When there is coarse grain in plenty, of course, the large-boned horse of the north gradually replaces the ox at the plough, and permits him to be bred, as with ourselves, not for draught at all, but for milking and killing exclusively. It is in this final phase that the Bread-and-Beef culture passes over eventually into the New World, and into the South Temperate Zone. It has been rather a long story to tell, and full of platitudes, but the gist of it is by this time clear. Whatever be the superstructure of social institutions, of arts and sciences, of religion and philosophy, that European men have built upon it, the régime which has made the Western World what it is, from before the dawn of metallurgy until now, has been generically a Bread culture; based on that combination of pastoral and agricultural life in which large cattle co-operate with man in the laborious preparation of the soil which cereal crops require. But the Bread culture itself is always supplemented by some form of milk product, of which cheese is typical. It is almost always supplemented further by some special provision of fats; in Mediterranean conditions by olives and oil, involving extensive tree culture; in the forest region by pig's meat; and on the Atlantic seaboard by butter and beef.

The exhilarants show the same geographic control; with the olive culture go the wines and brandies of the south; with the forest culture, the ciders and the cherry brandies of Central Europe; with the copious cereals and meadow-grass, the beers and whiskies of the North. In details, of course, the distribution of types is intricately confused; but the main outline is clear; and we reach a first glimpse of a coherent European culture, on the almost animal plane of regional foodquests.

RACE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE AS FACTORS OF UNITY

Precedence has been given in our inquiry to the mere animal struggle of man with nature for bare subsistence, for two distinct reasons. The first is economic, namely, that just because this struggle is without qualification that of a highly intelligent animal species to maintain itself under these or those conditions, it is one which befalls equally every breed or race of that species which is ever exposed to those conditions; and further, is no more mitigated by considerations of language than by considerations of race. The second reason is historical or archaeological. The spread of the Bread culture is dated so far back in the history of man in this region, as to make it certain that it preceded not merely the spread of the prevalent Indo-European group of languages, but even the present distribution of racial types. It certainly reached Italy, and the Atlantic seaboard as the British Isles, before the brachycephalic 'Alpine' men arrived there; and still more before the Boreal invasions of Britain and the opposite coasts. Indeed, it would be truer to say that in general each breed of man which has changed its distribution has had to adopt sooner or later the types of culture appropriate to the regions into which it has penetrated, than to associate the spread of any element of culture so fundamental as the food-quest with the migrations of any racial type.

Race, indeed, in Europe, as well as further afield, has been anything but a factor of unity. When we speak (on platforms) of Europeans as 'white men', we are in danger of forgetting, what every practical man in our audience knows, that we are dealing with at least three distinct breeds of mankind, which agree, indeed, rather imperfectly in the whiteness of their skin, but differ greatly in other points of structure and physique, including resistance to certain types of climate and regional diseases, and not least in temperament and the quality of their response to Nature's challenges of hardship or indulgence. Of these three breeds of man, only one, the blond Boreal giants (the only 'white men' in the strict sense of defect of pigment in skin, hair, and eyes) is exclusively European now, and has his habitat within the area of the 'Boreal' groups of animals and plants. His champions in ethnological propaganda seem to be of two minds about his earlier distribution; either his 'home' was round the Baltic, in which case it is difficult to see why he should be represented as a civilizing agency, in view of the cultural backwardness of that region; or else it was out on the Eurasian grassland, in which case he is as much an intruder into peninsular Europe as his brachycephalic 'Alpine' rival, and his claim to represent indigenous European man must go. The large part which he has played in European history seems to result partly from his great physical strength, surpassed (I believe) only by that of the Negro, partly from his reluctance, not so much to interbreed with more pigmented strains, but to admit the crossbred offspring to full partnership with himself. Even among his like, he has his own criteria by which one 'white man' knows another, and coheres with him politically.

Most strongly contrasted externally with the 'Boreal' type is the slight-built Mediterranean brunet. That his home is in the south, that he is closely related with the men of the African and Arabian grasslands, and that he was among the first post-glacial explorers of the Atlantic seaboard, is admitted. More doubt arises as to the extent to which he penetrated from these southern and western bases into the heart of peninsular Europe. Certainly as we trace him to the south-east he seems more and more restricted to the Mediterranean coastline, and at last has no early monopoly even of the islands. The contrast between Crete and Cyprus is instructive as to this. The 'Mediterranean' type, in fact, reaffirms to the anthropologist the close zoological affinity between South-west Europe and North-west Africa.

But if Europe 'ends at the Pyrenees', it ends also anthropologically at the Balkans, or even at the Carpathians; for the whole Balkan Peninsula, and most of the highland core of peninsular Europe, is essentially continuous with Asia Minor and the next eastward sections of the Mountain Zone, so far as its human population is concerned, no less than in its animals and plants. Biological continuity is as complete at the Bosphorus as it is at Gibraltar. Here, what remains in dispute is not so much whether 'Alpine' types are ultimately of Anatolian origin, as whether their spread in Europe has been early or late, and whether their predecessors here were predominantly 'Boreal' or 'Mediterranean'. It is difficult, and perhaps needless, to decide whether lack of evidence or political enthusiasm is more to blame for this; for the Roundheads of prehistoric and of modern Europe are as contentious matter as their English namesakes in the seventeenth century.

To this broadly threefold analysis of European man, add only this, that ever since the old 'Sarmatian' sea shrank to its present dimensions and left the grasslands open between Tienshan and the Carpathians, there has been a steady westward movement of Mongoloid folk until a strong enough Muscovy was interposed; and that along the Northern Woodland also there has been westward movement, slower but no less persistent; and it will be clear that it is not to race that we have to look for any uniform basis of our European culture.

Nor is such a basis to be found in Language. People often speak of Indo-European speech as though they really confused linguistic affinity with mutual intelligibility. But if you want to test the unifying influence of kindred languages, get a Welshman, a German, a Russian, and a Greek into a room together, and see what the 'concert of Europe' amounts to. The odds are that if they confer at all, they will do so in French, which is in the strict sense of the word a 'modern' language; while if you allowed them to write and gave them time, there is just a chance that the Greek would impose his language on the other three.

There is no need to labour this point further than to recall the fateful bisection of the culture of the European peninsula which resulted from the linguistic alienation of Constantinople from Rome; of the Mediterranean base which understood Latin, from that which thought in Greek. In this tragic respect, which the Turkish conquest, with its linguistic and religious sequel, has done little more than aggravate, Europe ends still at the Save; whereas Rome's greatest daughters have reconquered more than all that Carthage ever held in Africa. And the re-incorporation of Britain, too, into the comity of nations is concurrent with the Latinization of its speech, on which the seal was set in 1611. Late as it was, then, in any case, in the prehistory of the region, the spread of a single type of linguistic structure over Europe has brought not peace, but a sword.

What then of Religion? How far were the older ethnologists on the right lines, when (in spite of language, rather than aided by it) they co-ordinated their own Olympus with the confederate polytheisms of the North? Here, too, we have to keep the dates in mind, and clear ourselves of enthusiasms. It is not from Tacitus or Caesar, nor even so near to the Olympians' dwelling-place as the Thrace of Herodotus' time, that we get our modern impression of the nearness of Olympus to Asgard. If northern genealogies are any guide,--and they are not likely to have reduced the real interval wittingly--Rome's empire reached its full extent while Asgard was in building, or before. And Olympus was in building, by Greek accounts, not many generations before the Trojan War. In both cases we are dealing with political and almost historical transactions; it was not in finished societies like these that Great Gods (or their votaries either) set out from 'home' over the face of Europe to unite it.

And when we pass behind Olympian structures, and look into the cults which they served to federate, such uniformities as they present prove far too much. The open-air gods of Tacitus (Germania, chap. 9) are common to Semitic folk, and to many peoples further afield, who are either not sedentary or are themselves not easily 'confined within walls', but haunt 'forests and groves'.

Leaving, then, these high works of the mind, Language and Religion, which have proved but blind guides, and 'of a short stay' in this labyrinth, let us turn to the material evidence of industrial and aesthetic activity. Here we begin at least to get something like first-hand evidence, for we have the manufactured object itself, not Caesar's impression of a Celtic god, or Herodotus' transcript of a Scythian word. We can judge for ourselves of fabrics and styles, and though, of course, we have only objects of the least perishable sorts, stone, metal, pottery, we have, at all events, in the pottery the most imitative of arts, and therefore the widest basis for conclusions as to the principles of a style. Moreover, outside the sea-borne culture of the Mediterranean, pottery does not travel far: its uses are domestic, not commercial. John Gilpin's fate is typical of those who would carry things on horseback in bottles. Like words, however, potsherds enlighten us more about frontiers and contrasts than about uniformities. They are terribly provincial and tell their tale with a twang. We can trace our Bandkeramik and Schnurkeramik and Urfirnissmalerei and all that sort of technological idiom, across the map, as we can trace the centum and satem languages. But even if we could collate the 'Bandkeramiker' with the 'Satemvölker' as recent enthusiasts propose, we should be no nearer to a common technology for Europe than we were to a common language.

Metal, and even stone, implements do not help us much further, though they were traded more widely than pottery, and form larger provinces. In modern Europe, in the same way, pocket-knives are rather more uniform than milk-jugs; and where they differ, are referable to fewer types. But there is no unity, nor for the present any prospect of it. For anything more, we are reduced to the great crises of material culture, such as the introduction of bronze, of iron, of glass and glazed earthenware; and these we perceive increasingly not as turning points of the whole, but as processes within it, affecting now one region, now another, in a sequence which is clearly geographical and at very variable speed. Bronze, for example, took some thousands of years to permeate the continent of Europe; iron perhaps as many hundreds; platinum a little more than fifty years; and radium less than five.

What we do get from this material evidence, however, is a quite indisputable sequence of styles in time in each locality where we can hit upon stratified remains. Dead men, they say, tell no tales; potsherds are as truthful and eloquent as they are, for the very reason that, once broken, they are dead and done with, and are allowed to lie quiet in their rubbish heaps. Intervals indeed we cannot so easily measure; but of sequences we can be sure, and by comparing the sequences on different sites we can go far towards tracing the spread and supersession of a style, sometimes over wide areas, and occasionally, with the help of the geography, we can be pretty sure of the routes by which innovations travelled. We can infer nothing, however, from this as to the movements of people: the vogue of the willow-pattern plate is no measure of our 'yellow-peril'. But where works of art can travel, ideas can travel too; and can travel right across the frontiers of race and language and even of religion; meaning at all events by these, the customary observance of each region, and of its endemic population. A few merchants, or craftsmen, or philosophers, work transformations in culture and bring about uniformities, of which language, or cult-edifices give us no indication at all, or at best an aftermath of decadence.

It is not a merely ephemeral interest which draws attention at this point to the significance of engines of war, among this class of transferable inventions. Little has been done in a systematic way on this topic, but the rapidity with which a really important change in equipment and organization passes from camp to camp, and revolutionizes not only armies but states, when it is a question of survival or defeat, has its illustration in many phases of warfare, and ranks among the great levellers of national or regional pride.

The recorded movements of peoples in historic times, and the previous movements inferred from language, and other symptoms, indicate a long-established distribution of what might be described in meteorological phrase as man-pressure; certain regions being characterized either always or repeatedly by high man-pressure, and an outward flow of men into the cyclonic areas or vortexes of low man-pressure in the human covering (or biosphere) of the planet. Typical high-pressure regions are the Arabian peninsula with its repeated crises of Semitic eruption, and the great Eurasian grasslands. Typical regions of low man-pressure, and repeated irruption, are the South European peninsulas. Occasionally a region plays both parts, alternately accepting inhabitants, and unloading them on to other lands; examples are the Hungarian plain, Scandinavia, and Britain. Others again can hardly be said to have a population of their own at all, but are simple avenues of transmission, like Western Switzerland and the Hellespont Region. I am speaking now, of course, about ancient times. The causes of these recurrent movements are not clearly made out; but the movements themselves, and the fact that they are of regional recurrence, are matters of history.

Conspicuous among such movements are the westward drift from Asia into peninsular Europe, in its three parallel columns, through tundra, forest, and steppe; and the southward drifts, subsidiary to this, from East Central Europe into the Balkan lands and round the head of the Adriatic. The course of these drifts is laid out in detail, as we have seen, by the physique of the regions; and therewith is determined the kind of life which each set of folk must be living if it is to survive the journey.

And here we come at once upon a new factor making strongly for a more general uniformity of culture within peninsular Europe than its physical character would at all prepare us to expect. For although individual men often respond very rapidly to fresh surroundings, and can change their mode of life almost as they change their clothes, societies react far more slowly; at the pace, in fact, usually of their most obstinate members. Confronted therefore with the opportunity, or the need, for a change of habit, in the course of a migration for example, they must either refuse it, like a shy horse, or (if they accept it) enter on their new career imperfectly trained, and extemporizing adjustments here and there in very unworkmanlike fashion. Only rarely does the statesman or 'lawgiver' appear, just when he is wanted, to bring Israel up out of Egypt into the desert, and out of the desert into the good land beyond Jordan, and to canonize a new code of behaviour suited to a new set of needs. This social inertia, of which political history is the sorry record, is of course least perceptible, and most effective, when the region of transition is graduated gently; and we have already seen that this is conspicuously so around the parkland margin of the northern grassland, where it faces on peninsular Europe. Let us follow this clue in detail.

We may safely assume, as we have seen, that for a long while past, every group of newcomers into peninsular Europe has come equipped with the particular type of social organization which enabled it to make good, either on the tundra, or in the northern woodland, or on the steppe, or (if it came across the Bosphorus) on the enclosed plateaux of Asia Minor and beyond. The tundra does not greatly concern us, for the White Sea cuts through it, and deep into the woodland, and bars off the Lapps from the Samoyeds and their kin. Classical descriptions of the inhabitants of the North German plain make it clear that its culture, even so late as the first century B.C., was at its best a broken prolongation of the pastoral life of the steppe margin, and that less fortunate tribes either had never had cattle, like the hunting Redskins of the corresponding forest zone of North America, or had lost them since they entered the forest, and maintained themselves by hunting and robbery like the broken pastorals who infest the east edge of the Congo basin; the Chatti of Tacitus' day enjoying tyrannous hegemony not unlike that of the Five Nations.

It is probably to this westward drift from more purely pastoral condition to less, that we must attribute the only really large unity of European civilization in the later prehistoric ages, namely, its social organization in patriarchal households linked into clans and tribes. We may doubt whether this social type is permanently adaptable to a forest régime, any more than to industrial life. Certainly forest folk outside peninsular Europe only display it rarely and imperfectly. But it is characteristic of all pastoral folk; once established, it coheres and persists under great external stresses; and in early Europe its liability (strong though its structure is) to break up sooner or later into a more individualistic order, was counteracted by the recurrent drift of new grassland peoples westward from one of its principal homes. Grassland Arabia, let us note in passing, has been performing the same function, since history began, for its own marginal neighbours from Babylonia to Palestine and Egypt.

On the other hand, we now see why the feminism which recurs intermittently in our 'western' world culminates in those phases of its history when that world has been strong enough to close its avenues of intrusion for a while; in the far past which has left us the great goddesses and other matrilineal survivals; in industrial Babylonia; in the Minoan palaces; in fifth-and fourth-century Greece, as Aristophanes joins with Euripides to admit, and Euripides with Plato to advocate; in the Femmes savantes of renascent Europe; in eighteenth-century France, which seemed to itself so impregnable; and in the fin-de-siècle Europe of yesterday, pulling down its barns to build greater.

No one would suggest that this patriarchal and tribal structure favoured political unity or large enterprises of any kind. In fact, throughout the early history of Europe these coherent kinship groups, with their inner insulation and their inability to offer anything but passive resistance to the forces which were to dissolve them, were an insuperable bar to anything politically larger. 'If only these could hold together, they would rule the world' is the judgement of Herodotus on Scythia, of Thucydides on Thrace, of Polybius and Caesar upon Gaul, of Tacitus on Germany: each with the unspoken afterthought 'but thank goodness that they cannot!'

But while it hindered larger growths of political structure, so long as it remained intact, and furnished a strong social skeleton upon which to frame manners and ideals which are among man's highest achievements, patriarchal society had its own dangers, and has now so nearly succumbed to them, that to see its institutions in working order we have to penetrate into Albania or amongst the least modern backwoods of the Slav-speaking east. To take only the leading instance, Greek tribal society dissolved within historic times under the double attack of individualism, industrial and commercial, at the one end, and of the federalism of the city state, at the other. For Aristotle the village-community was the 'colony' ([Greek: apoikia]) or direct offspring of the patriarchal household, but he nowhere admits the city-state to be the 'colony' of the village-community. On the contrary, at the risk of upsetting his own theory of the state as a natural outgrowth of man's political nature, he lays stress on 'the man who first introduced them to each other' as the 'author of the greatest advantages'. And it was precisely this process of 'introducing them to one another', so that the members of hitherto autonomous clans became friends instead of enemies, and were thenceforth citizens all, in one and the same city-state, that terminated that period of migrations and political chaos which separates the Minoan from the Hellenic Age in Greek lands. Rome's mission among the tribal societies of Italy is essentially the same; and it is the lack of any such missionary of political enlightenment beyond the frontier of the Roman State in its imperial fullness, that makes early mediaeval problems, which were essentially the same, so slow to be solved.

We are now hard upon the borderland of history, and we take leave of a peninsular Europe--for the grassland stands still outside, as a distinct geographic entity--in which the diverse races, and languages, and religious schemes, and material cultures, are almost wholly propagated under the forms of societies of one homogeneous type, autonomous, indeed, like the states in the loosest of federations, and involved annually, somewhere or other, in intertribal feuds and war; but sufficiently acquainted with each other's customs to know that they were based on the same large needs, not merely of 'living' somehow but of 'living well', and to respect this common heritage of intertribal customs, so far that in their uttermost dealings with admitted aliens they were wont to 'make war like gentlemen'. To Homer's audience it was sure proof that Odysseus was really 'at the back of nowhere', when the Cyclops was unable to behave when a stranger came to his cave: he was 'a monster, of knowledge not according to the rules'. It was a criticism of despair, like that of M. Lévy-Bruhl: for the Cyclops had the 'will to power'.

Here, then, was a social structure and a political world, an oikoumené where men could live, tolerant of fairly wide variations in detail, within a general uniformity: for tribal society in Middle Italy or even in Western Greece, as we first catch sight of it, was by no means homogeneous with tribal society beyond the Alps in the times of Caesar and Tacitus. But apart from these variations, tribal Europe was a coherent whole; and it was so because, and as long as, no new problems of adjustment between Man and Nature arose to upset the balance struck by that Bread-culture with which we were concerned just now. For the patriarchal tribal societies, as we watch them still in Albania for example, are neither more nor less than the political aspect of that culture, and their varieties and deviations stand in close correlation with the varieties which we have seen the Bread-culture assume.

In the same way, the break-down of this social structure proceeds, step by step, in relation with the two great changes to which normal Bread-culture is exposed. On the one hand, primitive self-sufficiency (the retrospective ideal of Greek political thought) was infringed irrevocably as soon as contact was made with a region, like ancient Scythia, where, as Herodotus puts it, 'there are no earthquakes and they grow wheat to sell'; for in the Mountain Zone you are never secure against shocks, and almost never have any surplus of grain. Once in oversea contact with lands like these, it became more economical to buy grain thence, and to pay for it by increasing the production of oil and wine, than to grow everything at home; and a new and 'limitless' source of wealth emerged in the process of exchange.

On the other hand, oil and wine needing far less labour than grain-crops and offering longer leisure (which for Greeks meant the chance to start doing something else), the contemporary revelation of mineral wealth, and of many forms of craftsmanship, again largely (though not wholly) introduced from oversea, created another source of wealth, no less 'limitless' and dangerously unmanageable, in a world where wealth of any kind was literally 'so little good'. And this industrial wealth, like its commercial counterpart, was personal wealth, owed wholly to skill and push, and in no way due to your clansmen or your clan. When the poet cursed the discovery of metals, he put his finger on the 'key-industry' of the whole industrial development; and when he cursed the invention of shipping, he struck at the root-trouble of all, which had revealed to autonomous Bread-cultured tribes in peninsular Europe lands otherwise constituted and endowed by Nature, the exploitation of which seemed in the beginning so easy and obvious, but is, in fact, so profound a revolution for the societies whose members have attempted it. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was for him the shipbuilding pine.

But the dissolution of early European society and culture under the stress of contact with regions outside Europe is no matter of prehistoric times. The task of this essay is over when it has presented that society and culture as Man's reasoned attempt to 'live well' in an exclusively European world.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Marett, Anthropology. Home University Library.

J.L. Myres, The Dawn of History. Home University Library.

FOOTNOTES:

(Greek: andr' epeleusesthai megalên epieimenon alkên, agrion, oute dikas en eidota oute themistas.)]

Non huc Argoo contendit remige pinus, Neque impudica Colchis intulit pedem.... Iuppiter illa piæ secrevit litora genti, Ut inquinavit ære tempus aureum;

Ære, dehinc ferro duravit sæcula; quorum Piis secunda, vate me, datur fuga.]

III

THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME

It might appear the height of paradox to preface a discourse on the Ancient World by asserting the conviction that the only genuine and important history is contemporary history. Yet reflection on this doctrine will show that it is not only consistent with a serious and steady interest in what is called Antiquity (and indeed in the past in general), but its only rational basis and justification. Were the past really past it were dead--dead and done with, and it were wisdom for us who are alive to let the dead bury their dead. Much of what has been done and suffered under the sun is indeed gone beyond recall, and is well buried in forgetfulness. In such forgetfulness lies the fact and evidence of progress. 'Vex not its ghost'; no necromancy will or should evoke the departed spirits or avail to make them utter significant speech to living men. The chain of links which once bound stage to stage of human history is somewhere for ever broken; and as we retrace, in the memory of the race or in that of individual, the Ariadne-clue which we here call 'the unity of History' it vanishes somewhere beyond our vision into the dark backward and abysm of time. True, of late Archaeology and Anthropology have cast their search-lights into the darkness, piercing a little deeper than of old into the mists that surround the origins of our civilization; but before that dimly illuminated region of pre-history there still lies, and will always lie, an impenetrable pall. As again in thought we move forward down the stream of time, the light available to us for a while increases, increases till we reach the present where it threatens to blind us with its dazzling excess, and then suddenly fades and is quenched in the twilight and final darkness by which the future is hidden from us. Of the whole stream of history our best or utmost intelligence illuminates but a short reach, and that imperfectly.

'Our ignorance is infinitely greater than our knowledge,' and the wise historian is sobered but not discouraged by this reminder of the limits of his possible understanding. Neither the remote past nor the distant future can be the objects of knowledge nor, properly speaking, the subjects of judgement. If our insatiate curiosity has bounds thus eternally set to its satisfaction, we remember also that it is not either in the past or the future that we live, that we act and are acted upon, determine or have determined for us what we do or are to do, what we suffer or are to suffer. The present alone is real, and of the real alone is genuine knowledge possible. But if this is so, it is also so that of this alone does it import us to ascertain the true nature. What we have to discover (or perish in our blindness) is what we now are and where we now stand. All other so-called knowledge or understanding, save as it ministers to the framing of a true judgement concerning our present selves and our present situation and world, is but vanity or lumber, at best a rhetorical device for bringing before ourselves or others what we so judge concerning the one and the other. Genuine understanding, however it disguise itself as chronicle or prophecy, is always of the present or nothing.

But this present is not the momentary meeting-place of two eternities or the brief span of time which psychologists have named 'the specious present'. Its content is whatsoever is not the dead past or the unborn future; it is whatever is still or already alive, whatever is yet or already operative and formative in our inward selves or our outward environment--in a word what is contemporary, contemporary with our present doings and sufferings. To such a present it is idle to attempt to fix limits of date before or behind. A new conception of the unity of History rises before us as we realize that the Past and the Future are not severed by the Present, but that these meet and are made one in its living and concrete actuality. This is the fact, the centre to which all radii converge and from which they diverge again; and in the Present the Past and the Future live and are, together and all at once.

Bearing this in mind, we approach the records of history in a new spirit and with a new hope. We desire to know neither origins nor ends, we expect no cosmogony and we look for no apocalyptic vision. What we aim at understanding is what we now are and where we now stand, and we realize that to understand this we must not restrict our study to what is merely of recent acquisition or growth. Neither ourselves nor our environment are bounded by chronological limits; both are contemporary with the Pyramids just as much as with the Eiffel Tower. We are not merely the heirs but the epitomes of the ages. As our bodies are but the present forms on which the secular forces of the earth continue their dateless activities, so our spirits, our minds, our very selves are the forms in which other spirits now forgotten or dimly remembered still live and move and have their being, fulfilling the work which, while still their names were named, they initiated or advanced. Not in pious gratitude only must we labour to rescue their memory from fast-coming oblivion, but because only so can we reach that knowledge of ourselves and our world which is to us as living men all and alone important. Nor will such study deny to us the reward we seek. So approaching the labours of the historian, we shall not be jealous because he comes before us with a tale, or as we call it, with a 'story'--a narrative of 'old unhappy things and battles long ago'. For though he so puts it, spacing it out in sections, half-concealing, half-revealing its logical connexions and ultimate unity, its real meaning, its ultimate--which is also its present--import is an account of what we now are and the situation in which we now stand; and unless somehow for each of us its message comes into such an account, distils and sublimates into such a quintessential judgement on the present, History remains but 'a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. It is in the profoundest sense useless to us unless in the end we can say 'De nobis fabula narratur'--it is our history to which we have been listening.

This is especially true of the history of the Ancient World--the world of classical antiquity. It is not a dead world; its deeds and thoughts are not past but still live, still 'breathe and burn' in us. They are largely the stuff of which our present selves and our present world are made. Not merely, I repeat, in the sense that then were the foundations of both laid, not merely in the sense that we are heirs to the labours of our ancestors. We are the Greeks and the Romans, made what we now are by their deeds and thoughts and experiences, our world their world, at a later stage of an evolution never interrupted but always one and single. Our births and deaths are but a sleep and a forgetting in the unbroken biography of a spirit, not above but in us all, which is the hero of the history of European civilization, itself a part of the history of Humanity. Thus the history of Antiquity, and especially of Classical Antiquity, is the record of the thoughts and deeds of our own youth.

Our deeds (and also our thoughts) still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are.

This is the spirit and the conviction in which I would invite you to approach the study of Classical Antiquity--not merely in that of gratitude and reverence, not certainly in that of idle and futile curiosity, but as seekers for knowledge of yourselves and your world. For what other knowledge matters?

This quest is but the beginning of a search which is and must be lifelong. Perhaps I am wrong in calling it the beginning, and there are others who would and do bid you begin earlier. I can only ask you to begin where I began or begin myself. At any rate if you begin later or elsewhere I am confident that you will lose much light on your present selves and your present world. My own temptation has been rather to stop too soon and so to overleap the intervening period--the 'Middle Ages'--between such Antiquity and the Present. Fortunately for you, you have guides who will point out to you the way of a profitable and instructive journey across the--to me--unknown or imperfectly explored land. I must, however, in no controversy with any of my fellow lecturers here, say a word on the contention that the true beginning of the modern mind and its world--our mind and our world--lies later and elsewhere than in Classical Antiquity. The birthday and birthplace of that mind and its world have been variously fixed. We have been bidden to find the one, say, as late as the sixteenth century and the other--not from the same point of view--in the plains and woods of Northern Europe or in the deserts of Arabia or in some still more vaguely indicated region of the East. But I must avow my conviction that our civilization--and I specially remember that we are Englishmen--is not only in origin but in essence, Greco-Roman, modified no doubt by influences unknown to that in its earlier stages, but still Greco-Roman grown to a larger stature and a clearer self-consciousness, self-shaped to its present form, the same vital and vitalizing force, constantly reinvigorated and re-enlightened by reflection upon its own past. It is a true instinct that in this country still bases our system of higher education upon a study of the languages and literature of Classical Antiquity. We are, as Englishmen, co-heirs, because co-descendants of Classical Antiquity, with France and Italy and Greece, yes also with Germany, for European civilization--and not European civilization only--is, I reiterate, in essence still Greco-Roman, not Teutonic or Semitic. At least, if this inheritance is not ours by descent it is ours by adoption, and we are equally legitimate members of the household. And the bonds of such spiritual kinship are closer and more durable than those of blood, if indeed those of blood provably exist at all.

The works and thoughts of which I am to speak--the dreams, the plans, the hopes and aspirations--are assuredly ours also, the stuff and substance of our being, our inner genius, our guiding and controlling selves, what we in our first youth imagined and conceived, what we believed, what we, in our later maturity, designed and in part executed. If we turn inward we cannot read them there, for the characters are small and faded; but as we hear their history recounted as it is by professional historians, we recognize it as the record of a past which is our very own, while at the same time it is a past which we share with other nations who are our co-partners in the work of conserving, deepening, extending, enriching the present-day civilization of Europe and the world.

In most of us at all times, and in all of us at most times, these influences and their operations lie deep below the threshold of consciousness, some of them deeper than any plummet of self-analysis can sound. They are also the unseen foundations of the social and political superstructure in which we live. Or, to use another figure, they form the fertile soil in which we, with all our activities and institutions, are rooted and from which we draw no small part of our spiritual sustenance. Hence it is highly pertinent here and now to examine them, for in this identity of foundation is to be found the primary unity of the now diffused life of Europe which has parted into so many and so widely divergent currents of national life. We all come spiritually from the same ancient home, and it is well and wise to recall its memories. So we and others shall be the more disposed to re-knit the old bonds and to weave new ones which may one day restore on a grander scale, in more organized fullness and more efficacious potency, the primordial unity which interests and passions have with rude violence, at least in appearance, disrupted and dissolved and so for a time arrested or enfeebled.

I have many predecessors in the task of answering the question, What do we owe to the Greeks? Any answer which I have to offer, must, in the compass at my disposal, be imperfect; it must also be abstract; and lastly it cannot but be in form dogmatic. But I think it is not too much to say that it is to the Greeks that we owe the very conception of civilization and through that in large measure its very existence. The truth of this is more evident if we put the truth in another way, saying that the Greeks first explicitly recognized the contrast between the barbarous and the civilized state of mankind, and delivered themselves and us from the former by defining the latter and attempting, not without success, to establish it in actual reality. No doubt before them men had felt the pressure of barbarism within and without, and had framed dreams of something better, but it was the Greeks who first defined and conceived the ideal and so made it possible to realize it. Their distinctive peculiarity lay in their setting themselves not merely to imagine but to think out an ideal of civilized life, and narrowly and abstractly as to the end they conceived this ideal, they discerned the main essential lines of its structure, the permanent laws of its development and well-being. In doing this they discovered the need and efficacy of knowledge for the conduct of human life, individual and collective; and found in knowledge no mere means to living but a new and heightened form of life itself, lifted above the trammelling conditions, the disillusionments and disappointments of the merely practical life. Thus they created Science and Philosophy, bequeathing to us the ideals and the results of the one and the other. We may so far define their contribution as consisting in the thought of Civilization-through-knowledge, a thought which was not a thought only but a potent and effective instrument of action, not a mere ideal but an ideal governing, directing, and realized, in action and life.

We have also to recognize another most powerful influence of which they were the vehicles--closely related to the other. The Greeks first articulately conceived and deliberately pursued the ideal of Freedom. It was, I say, closely related to the other, for they meant by it not merely freedom from physical or political constraint but also inward freedom from prejudice and passion, and they held that knowledge and freedom rendered one another possible. We may amend our formula and re-state their contribution as the idea and fact of civilization regarded as a process in and to Freedom under the control of Knowledge or Reason, each inspiring, guiding, and fertilizing the other. Theory and practice thus co-operate and help one another forward; each in its advance liberates the other for a further effort. The several faculties of the human spirit work harmoniously together in mutual respect and reciprocal alliance. Hence arises another distinctive feature of the Greek ideal, namely, that of wholeness or all-round completeness; there is in it no one-sided insistence on this or that element in human nature, no tendency to ascetic mutilation, no fear or jealousy of what is merely human, tainted by its animal origin or its secular associations.

But we must not exaggerate. This ideal was imperfectly defined, still more imperfectly executed or realized. It would be absurd to suppose that it was held by all Greeks; it was indeed advocated by and for a minority only. Those who now find in it the impulse and guide of Greek history might be hard put to it if they were obliged to produce evidence of their faith, and they would be forced to confess that there was much to be said against their interpretation. There is to be acknowledged first the apparent want of internal unity in the Greek world, split up as it was into small and mutually hostile civic groups; and secondly, the loose coherence of each of these groups within itself (for each, we might almost say normally, was torn by intestine faction). It is a commonplace also that Greek civilization rested upon slavery, so that barbarism was not expelled but remained as a domestic and ever-present evil. Freedom and enlightenment was not in thought or practice designed for all men, but only for Greeks, and among them only in reality for a privileged minority. The notion of a civilized world or even a civilized Greece was, if present at all, present only in feeling or imagination, not in clear vision or distinct thought, still less as an ideal of practical politics. On the other hand the ideal so narrowly conceived was not in principle confined to a 'chosen people', or to one strain of blood. It supplied a programme extensible to all who could show their title to be regarded as members of the common race of humanity. As the special features of Greek civilization faded, the lineaments of this common humanity emerged more clearly into view, and the Greek, when he was compelled to give up his parochialism and provincialism, found himself already in spirit prepared to take his place as a citizen of the world. He had learned his lesson, and to him the whole world went to school, first to learn of him what civilization meant and then to better his instructions.

This the world did, but not once for all; for every time since that mankind, or at least European mankind, has begun to lose faith in its dream of civilization or has again to shake itself free from the menace of outward or inward barbarism, it has always reverted to the thought and life of Greece and drawn inexhaustibly from it new light and new fruit, for it is its own thought and its own life, while still there ran in its veins the freshness and the vigour, the blitheness and hopefulness of its immortal youth. In meditating upon the unforgotten debt which we owe to Greece, we revive in memory what the spirit which now lives and moves in us not only once accomplished but still in each new generation accomplishes, accomplishing ever the better if it repeats its former achievements with increased consciousness and more deliberate care. We too here and now have to define what we mean by civilization, by knowledge, by freedom. Otherwise our future will be determined for us, and not by us. 'What is to come out of this struggle? Just anything that may come out of it, or something we mean shall come out of it?' Assuredly, if we are not to stand bankrupt before our present problem, we must go to school with Greece, with Rome, with Classical Antiquity, and in the end with all History, that is to say, with our own experience as a whole; or out of the spreading chaos no civilized cosmos will be re-born. Our civilization has been shaken to its foundations, the task before us and our descendants is to rebuild once more in Europe a habitable city for the mind of man; and in designing and reconstructing it we must take counsel with our predecessors who first found the way of escape from outward and inward barbarism, doing for and in us what we would do for and in our successors.

The first and most obvious achievement of the Greek mind was the deliverance of itself in the sphere of the imagination. Behind the fair creations of Greek art lies a dark and ugly background, but it does lie behind them. That was its first conquest. Under the magic spell of Art the hateful and terrifying shapes of barbarous religion retreated and the world of imagination was peopled with gracious and attractive figures. The Greek Pantheon is, for all its defects, a world of dignified and beautiful humanity. 'No thorn or threat stains its beauty bright.' On the whole the gods which are its denizens are humanized and humane, the friends and allies of men, who therefore feel themselves not abased or helpless in their relations with them. 'Of one kind are gods and men,' and their common world is one in which men feel themselves at home. Dark shadows there are, but they hide no mysteries to appal and unman. The imagination is free to follow its own laws, and so to create what is lovely and lovable. Language is no longer a tyrant but a willing and dexterous servant, and the Greek language reflecting, as all language does, the spirit of its users, is the most perfect instrument that the human mind has ever devised for the expression of its dreams. The works which were then created have ever since haunted the mind of Europe like a passion, and we are right in speaking of them as immortal, 'a joy for ever'.

In such a manner the Greek mind humanized its world, and in doing so humanized itself, or rather divinized itself, without stretching to the breaking-point the strands which bound itself to its world. But it did not stop there, and we do it wrong if we dwell too exclusively on its triumphant achievements in literature and art. For 'speech created thought, which is the measure of the universe'. The Greeks were not only supreme artists but also the pioneers of thought. They first took the measure of the Universe in which they lived, asserting the mind of man to be its measure, and it amenable and subject to reason. The world they lived in was not only beautiful to the imagination, it was also reasonable, penetrable, and governable by the intellect. The ways of it and everything in it were regular and orderly, predictable, explicable not eccentric, erratic, baffling and inscrutable. Not only was Nature knowable; it was also through knowledge of it manageable, a realm over which man could extend his sway, making it ever a more and more habitable home. In it and availing himself of its offered aid he built his households and his cities, dwelling comfortably in his habitations. But the thought which enabled him to lay a secure basis, economic and social or political, for his life had other issues and promised other fruit. The Greek mind became interested in knowledge for its own sake and in itself as the knower of its world.

The second and more important creation of the Greek mind was Science or the Sciences. In no earlier civilization can we trace anything but the faintest germs of this, while in Greek civilization it comes almost at once to flower and fruit. First and foremost we have to think of Mathematics, of Arithmetic and Geometry and Optics and Acoustics and Astronomy, but we must not forget also their later and perhaps not wholly so successful advances in Physics and Chemistry, in Botany and Zoology, in Anatomy and Physiology. Doubtless, especially in the case of the Sciences where experiments are required and have proved so fertile in the extension of our knowledge, there were grave defects, and too much trust was placed in mere observation and hasty speculation; but what they accomplished in Science is no less but more marvellous than what they accomplished in Art. The idea of Science was there, disengaged from the limiting restrictions of practical necessities, the idea of free and therefore all the more potent Science. The whole physical--and much more than the physical--environment of human life was proclaimed permeable to human thought and therefore governable by human will or at any rate already amicable and amenable to human purposes.

But yet a third advance was made. The Greek mind became conscious of itself as the knower and therefore the lord and master of its world. Turning inward upon itself it discovered itself as the centre of its universe and set itself to explore this new inner realm of being. In the consciousness of itself it found inexhaustible interest and strength. Thus it created Philosophy, its last and greatest gift to humanity. In so doing it freed itself from the trammels even of Science, which thus became its servant and not its master--at the same time finally liberating itself from the narrowing and blinding influences of passion and imagination and all the shackles of merely practical needs and disabilities. Here too it fixed the idea or the ideal. 'Life without reflection upon life, without self-examination and self-study and self-knowledge, is a life not worth living by man.' In doing so it revealed a self deeper than the physical being of man and an environment wider and more real--more stable and permanent--than the physical cosmos, finding in the one and the other something more enduring, substantial, and precious than shows itself either to Science or the economic and political prudence, yet which alone gives meaning and worth to the one and the other. Thus for the first time arose before the mind of man the conception of a life not sunk in nature and practice, but superior to them and the end or meaning of their existence--a life of intense activity, of unfailing interest, of inexhaustible and eternal value.

This life was throughout the duration of Greek thought too narrowly conceived. It was frequently thought and spoken of as the life of a spectator or bystander or onlooker, as a life withdrawn or isolated, cut off from what we should call ordinary human business and concerns, a life into which we, or at least a few of us, could escape or be transported at rare intervals and under exceptionally favourable circumstances. Yet in principle it was open to all, and certainly not confined to those privileged by birth or wealth or social position. It was not the reward of magical favour or ascetic exercises, it was reached by the beaten path of the loyal citizen and the resolute student. There was about it no esoteric mystery or other-worldliness. And if to reach it was a high privilege its attainment brought with it the imperative duty of a descent into the ordinary world to instruct, to enlighten, to comfort and help and console, to play a part in the great business and work of human civilization. In a sense this was, and is, the most permanent and fruitful gift of Greece to the European world.

These then were the three ideas or ideals which the Greeks wrought into the very texture and substance of the modern mind, the idea of Art, the idea of Science, the idea of Philosophy; in all three introducing and still more deeply implanting the ideas of Freedom as the motive and end of civilized life and of Knowledge as its guide and ally. It may be thought that I have dwelt too much on theory, and have not said enough of the specific contribution of Greece as working out in practice a certain type or types of corporate life such as the City State; but the fact is that in Greek civilization theory continually outran practice and that it endowed mankind much more with ideas or ideals than with practical illustrations or models for our imitation. Yet again we must not exaggerate or imagine these ideas as merely Utopian or such stuff as dreams are made of. The ferment which they set up burst the fabric of Greek social and political institutions, but it clarified and steadied down, as the enthusiasms of youth may do, into the sober designs of grave and energetic manhood.

The spectacle of the dissolution of the Greek civilization is not a pleasant one. 'The glory that was Greece' fades out of the world and leaves it grey and dull, and there was worse than this; there was also decay and degeneracy and corruption. To dwell upon it is as the sin of Ham. Nevertheless what took place was not a mere relapse towards barbarism, but on the contrary the supersession of a form of civilization which had done its work by another form less attractive, but more sound and solid. The Romans have the airs of grown and grave men beside the perpetual youth of Greece, (the Greeks were 'always children') but they are well aware of how much they learned and had to learn from their predecessors in the task of civilizing the world. So much is this so that in many departments of civilized life they look upon themselves as imitating the Greeks and carrying out their ideas. In this they were less than just to themselves, for even in the world of art they continued to create; and certainly in literature they produced works not unworthy to stand beside their chosen models. Especially they created a prose style, which without ceasing to be artistic served the sober and serious purposes of political oratory and historic record. But their peculiar genius showed itself most in the applied arts which pressed Greek science into the ministry of life in architecture and engineering. Their roads and bridges and aqueducts still stand to bear witness of them. It would be a great error to deny to them fertile advance in the sciences, because their discoveries are so immediately put to the proof in practice and so little disengage themselves into express theory from their applications.

But before we proceed to reckon up their contributions to European civilization it is well to correct a misconception which arises only too easily from an accident of our education. It is the custom in England to concentrate attention upon a brief period in the history of Rome, ignoring on the one hand the early Republican period and on the other the later Imperial. There is thus lost to our imaginations those figures and their deeds which seemed for example to Shakespeare most characteristically Roman and to our more thoughtful consideration those achievements which most deeply moulded the fabric of Europe. The latter is the greater loss, and here we must remember that it is the history of Imperial Rome that is most relevant to our purpose and most informative. Under the Empire Rome worked as a master, no longer as an apprentice or a journeyman. The theatre of her civilizing activities was here little less than the whole world then known, and the boast is not unjustified that she made into a city what had formerly been but a world, as we might say, merely a geographical expression. The record of that progress reads to us too much as a narrative of incessant warfare, and we are accustomed to think of her empire as a gigantic military power, but in reality it was in aim and result essentially pacific, and so appeared to those who lived under her sway. To them the name of her empire was the 'Roman peace'. It was as such that the memory of it haunted the minds of men when it too broke down from internal economic disorders and external pressure, and a distracted and divided Europe looked back to it as the pattern for a restored civilization.

The aim and result of the Roman Empire was peace, a world-wide peace. It is true that this end was not very articulately defined by those who pursued it, but (perhaps just because of that) the means to it were more practically designed and more effectively executed. The civilized world was one and to be treated as one; it was still Rome under a single government and a single head. There arose then the idea of a supreme sovereignty one and indivisible, that was the absolutely indispensable condition of a world peace. But the necessity of organization was equally grasped, insisted upon, realized. The civilized world was covered with a network of institutions through which the will of the Emperor flowed and circulated throughout the Empire. Peace through system and order--that was the secret of the Roman success. But two other ideas must be added to complete the explanation. The one was the idea or ideal of Justice; no system and no order could work unless it was, and commended itself to its subjects as being, scrupulously and exactly just. The second idea was that in order to be this it must be a legal system, based upon a known body of legal rights and duties, determining and controlling the whole conduct of the subjects to the sovereign and to one another. The notion which the Romans, not so much by their thought or speech, but by their acts, added to the world's stock was that of a peace secured and maintained by the just operation throughout the civilized world of a system of law the same for all, issuing from and enforced by a single central power.

The notion is at least grandiose, and so stated seems almost too high and difficult for human nature to realize. Yet for centuries it was applied, and applied with marvellous success. Nor in spite of its apparent failure in the end has the idea of it ceased to dominate men's minds. I do not speak here of the transitory imitation of it by the Carolingians or of the attempt at the restitution or copy of it in the spiritual sphere of the Church, or again of its phantom survival in the ghostly form of the Holy Roman Empire. But I would point to the way in which it still--in thought--controls us when without essential alteration of the idea we transfer its application to the nation and still look for the secret of its peace and strength in an organization of all its activities under a law proceeding from and enforced by a sovereign will resident somewhere within its structure, a law demanding and receiving obedience from all loyal subjects. Nor is the hope extinct that the way to a wider or world-wide peace lies through the restoration of a similar system in its application to international relations. Though I am unable to share this hope (or indeed the desire that its realization should be endeavoured after), I find it impossible to judge that it has yet lost its hold on men's minds or is without elements of importance in view of our present problem and perplexity.

It is perhaps more profitable to ask what we have to learn from the history both of its success and its failure. Of its success for a time and long time in the history of Europe there can be no doubt, and on its permanent effects rests much of what is most sound and stable in the civilization of modern Europe. Peace there was because of it, and again because of it and what it accomplished Europe resisted and survived internal disorder and barbarian invasion so that, as I said above, what still exists as a united or allied Europe is the Roman or Romanized world. Roman ideas and ideals still hold it together, although the Roman Empire has declined and fallen, and no other Empire has risen or, I trust, may rise, upon its ruins. It is not my business to analyse the causes of that decline and fall, though a few words on them may not be out of place. In the first place it declined and fell because those who administered ignored its economic substructure, paying no attention to the causes which were undermining its very material basis, or the enormous suffering which the neglect and consequent disorganization of that entailed. In the second, and partly because of that neglect, they did not sufficiently strengthen its defences against external attack; I do not so much mean in the way of remissness in military preparation as by a surcease of the former policy of bringing their barbarous or semi-civilized neighbours into the higher system, and so extending the range of civilization. It is perhaps fanciful to suggest that we are now suffering the penalty of the failure of Rome to Romanize, that is to say, to civilize their Teutonic neighbours. In the third place, they erred by not recognizing and taking account of new forces which in the way of ideas were entering into the conception of civilized life, the ideas which we mass together under the head of feudalism, the idea of nationality. Under the influence of the one and the other the ideal of a single world State, with a uniform or rigid system of laws resting upon a sovereign will, one and indivisible, dissolved, or at least entered upon dissolution, approving itself unadapted or unadaptable to the needs of a novel and immensely more complex situation of the world. No mere tinkering at it did or could suffice to save it; and the organization of Europe based upon it collapsed.

The Revolution of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries was in many ways the last attempt to reinstate it, and failure to do so pronounced its doom. We cannot now look forward to the reorganization of civilized Europe on the model of the Roman Empire or of an Empire at all, and the more definitely formulated hope of salvation by the erection or re-erection of an international system of law in any real sense seems to me an unsubstantial dream--the administration of a belated nostrum for our disease, not a panacea. Not that way do the lessons of history point. The Roman ideal must be transformed, must be reborn, if it is not to lead our anticipations and our actions wholly astray. No more in the political or secular sphere than in the spiritual or ecclesiastical is 'Romanism' a possible guide to the reconstruction of modern European civilization. For that far too much water (and blood) has run under the bridge. Yet the spirit which gave it life and efficacy is immortal, and the study of the secret of its vitality and power is a necessity for us. In the work of reconstruction we must learn from the Romans the value of System and Order, of Justice and Law, as from Greece we have ever afresh to learn the love of Freedom and Truth.

The Greeks have given us the idea of a life worth living which civilization renders possible, but does not directly produce. This life in its essential features they rightly conceived, but its content they failed to articulate, and whether because of that or not, they failed to realize its indispensable conditions, material, economic, political, &c. The Romans did more effectively realize this, but they lost sight of the ends in the means, securing a peace, a comfort, an ease, a leisure of which they made no particularly valuable use. It has been said that at no time in the world's history were civilized men so happy as under the Roman Empire. It might be said with greater truth that at no time were civilized men so unhappy, for the happiness that was theirs was empty, mere dead-sea fruit, dust and ashes in the mouth; a very Death in Life. Life was without savour, and they turned away from it in weariness and disgust and despair, seeking and finding in Philosophy--the fruits of reflection upon life--nothing better than consolation for the wounds and disillusions of life. Thus those who gave their lives to Rome lost heart, and retreating into themselves found nothing there but solitude and emptiness. Civilization was but the husk of a life that had fled.

Nevertheless, as it is necessary for the living body to deposit a bony skeleton and for the living soul to harden its impulses into habits and stiffen its aspirations into rules and plans of action, so civilization as a whole must create within and around it a structure of ordered and systematic thought and action within which the higher forces now recognized and disengaged may be all the more free to do their work. Without such a mechanical or apparently unspiritual basis these forces can only work fugitively, erratically, and so ineffectively, as they did in the Greek world. To the prosaic business of creating or recreating and maintaining in being such a structure a large part of our energies must be devoted, and in all this from the Romans we have still much to learn. If we decline to learn and digest this lesson, turning from such concernment in disgust or disdain, our lives will be lost in vain dreams, in idle longings and empty regrets; and the kingdom of Freedom and Truth will be taken from us and given to others who have known how to grow up and to face like men the hardships and hazards without which it cannot be won or held. From the inspiring visions of these ideals we must turn as we did when we and our world were Roman, to the serious and sober task of creating a political and legal structure on which the eternal spirit of European civilization can resume its work of extending, deepening, enriching, the common life of Humanity.

It seems as if we--the heirs of their experience--bound to face a more appalling problem, are bankrupt, even of hopes, having lost both the ideal of a life worth living on this earth and that of some large and complex organization rendering this life possible. But this is not so, for the forces which in Antiquity created and for long maintained a civilization at first desirable and then strong, are not spent. Still they make the Greco-Roman civilization which is ours a thing worth living and dying for; still they hold us together in a unity and concord deeper than ever plummet can sound, obscured but not destroyed by the present noise and confusion of battle. Still at heart we care--and not we only but also our enemies and all neutrals benevolent or malevolent--for the ends for which civilization exists, for the peace and order and justice which are their necessary conditions: we still have minds to devise and wills to execute whatever is necessary to its progress. Still we are willing to learn of history and resolved to better its instruction, to know ourselves and our world and adjust our ideas and our acts to the situation in which we find ourselves. The civilized world has not lost heart or hope; and will not, so long as the dreams of its immortal youth and the plans of its immortal manhood are not lost to its memory or passed beyond its retrospective reflection.

Note. The doctrine that all History is contemporary History has been best set forth by Benedetto Croce, of Naples, from whose works several expressions have here been borrowed, with a profound acknowledgement of indebtedness to him.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Hegel, Philosophy of History, Parts II and III (to be read not as philosophy, but as history guided and enlightened by philosophy). Translation in Bohn's Library.

Marvin, The Living Past. Clarendon Press.

Adamson, The Development of Greek Philosophy. W. Blackwood. (For a brief but pregnant account consult Webb's History of Philosophy. Home University Library.)

Butcher's Some Aspects of the Greek Genius ('What we owe to Greece'). Macmillan.

Murray's Rise of the Greek Epic. Clarendon Press.

Warde Fowler's Rome. Home University Library.

Bryce's Holy Roman Empire. Macmillan.

UNITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Ergo humanum genus bene se habet et optime, quando secundum quod potest Deo adsimilatur. Sed genus humanum maxime Deo adsimilatur quando maxime est unum; vera enim ratio unius in solo illo est. Propter quod scriptum est: 'Audi, Israel, Dominus Deus tuus unus est'. DANTE, De Monarchia, i. viii.

He who shuts his eyes to-day to make a mental picture of the world sees a globe in which the mass of Asia, the bulk of Africa, and the length of America vastly outweigh in the balance the straggling and sea-sown continent of Europe. He sees all manner of races, white and yellow, brown and black, toiling, like infinitesimal specks, in every manner of way over many thousands of miles; and he knows that an infinite variety of creeds and civilizations, of practices and beliefs--some immemorially old, some crudely new; some starkly savage, and some softly humane--diversify the hearts of a thousand million living beings. But if we would enter the Middle Ages, in that height and glory of their achievement which extended from the middle of the eleventh to the end of the thirteenth century, we must contract our view abruptly. The known world of the twelfth century is a very much smaller world than ours, and it is a world of a vastly greater unity. It is a Mediterranean world; and 'Rome, the head of the world, rules the reins of the round globe'. From Rome the view may travel to the Sahara in the south; in the east to the Euphrates, the Dniester, and the Vistula; in the north to the Sound and the Cattegat (though some, indeed, may have heard of Iceland), and in the west to the farther shores of Ireland and of Spain. Outside these bounds there is something, at any rate to the east, but it is something shadowy and wavering, full of myth and fable. Inside these bounds there is the clear light of a Christian Church, and the definite outline of a single society, of which all are baptized members, and by which all are knit together in a single fellowship.

Economically the world was as different from our own as it was geographically. Money, if not unknown, was for the most part unused. It had drifted eastwards, in the latter days of the Roman Empire, to purchase silks and spices; and it had never returned. From the days of Diocletian, society had been thrown back on an economy in kind. Taxes took the form either of payments of personal service or of quotas of produce: rents were paid either in labour or in food. The presence of money means a richly articulated society, infinitely differentiated by division of labour, and infinitely connected by a consequent nexus of exchange. The society of the Middle Ages was not richly articulated. There were merchants and artisans in the towns; but the great bulk of the population lived in country villages, and gained subsistence directly from the soil. Each village was practically self-sufficing; at the most it imported commodities like iron and salt; for the rest, it drew on itself and its own resources. This produced at once a great uniformity and a great isolation. There was a great uniformity, because most men lived the same grey, quiet life of agriculture. The peasantry of Europe, in these days when most men were peasants, lived in the same way, under the same custom of the manor, from Berwick to Carcassonne, and from Carcassonne to Magdeburg. But there was also a great isolation. Men were tied to their manors; and the men of King's Ripton could even talk of the 'nation' of their village. If they were not tied by conditions of status and the legal rights of their lord, they were still tied, none the less, by the want of any alternative life. There were towns indeed; but towns were themselves very largely agricultural--the homes of summa rusticitas--and what industry and commerce they practised was the perquisite and prerogative of local guilds. Custom was king of all things, and custom had assorted men in compartments in which they generally stayed. The kaleidoscopic coming and going of a society based on monetary exchanges--its speedy riches and speedy bankruptcies, its embarrassment of alternative careers all open to talents--these were unthought and undreamed of. The same uniformity and the same isolation marked also, if in a less degree, the knightly class which followed the profession of arms. A common feudal system, if we can call that a system which was essentially unsystematic, reigned over the whole of Western Europe, and, when Western Europe went crusading into Syria, established itself in Syria. Historians have tried to establish distinctions between the feudalism of one country and that of another--between the feudalism of England, for instance, and that of France. It is generally held nowadays that they have failed to establish the distinction. A fief in England was uniform with a fief in France, as a manor in one country was uniform with manors in other countries, and a town in one country with towns in others. 'One cannot establish a line of demarcation between German and French towns,' says a famous Belgian historian, 'just as one cannot distinguish between French and German feudalism.' The historian of the economic and institutional life of the Middle Ages will err unless he proceeds on the assumption of its general uniformity. But the uniformity of the fief, like that of the manor and the town, was compatible with much isolation. Each fief was a centre of local life and a home of local custom. The members of the feudal class lived, for the most part, local and isolated lives. Fighting, indeed, would bring them together; but when the 'season' was over, and the forty days of service were done, life ran back to its old ruts in the manor-hall, and if some of the summer was spent in company, much of the winter was spent in isolation. On a society of this order--stable, customary, uniform, with its thousands of isolated centres--the Church descended with a quickening inspiration and a permeating unity. Most of us find a large play for our minds to-day in the competition of economics or the struggles of politics. The life of the mind was opened to the Middle Ages by the hands of the Church. We may almost say that there was an exact antithesis between those days and these latter days, if it were not that exact antitheses never occur outside the world of logic. But it is as nearly true as are most antitheses that while our modern world is curiously knit together by the economic bonds of international finance, and yet sadly divided (and never more sadly than to-day) by the clash of different national cultures and different creeds, the mediaeval world, sundered as it was economically into separate manors and separate towns, each leading a self-sufficing life on its own account, was yet linked together by unity of culture and unity of faith. It had a single mind, and many pockets. We have a single pocket, and many minds. That is why the wits of many nowadays will persist in going wool-gathering into the Middle Ages, to find a comfort which they cannot draw from the golden age of international finance.

But retrogression was never yet the way of progress. It is probable, for instance, that the sanitation of the Middle Ages was very inadequate, and their meals sadly indigestible; and it would be useless to provoke a revolt of the nose and the stomach in order to satisfy a craving of the mind. An uncritical mediaevalism is the child of ignorance of the Middle Ages. Sick of vaunting national cultures, we may recur to an age in which they had not yet been born--the age of a single and international culture; but we must remember, all the same, that the strength of the Middle Ages was rooted in weakness. They were on a low stage of economic development; and it was precisely because they were on a low stage of economic development that they found it so easy to believe in the unity of civilization. Unity of a sort is easy when there are few factors to be united; it is more difficult, and it is a higher thing, when it is a synthesis of many different elements. The Middle Ages had not attained a national economy: their economy was at the best municipal, and for the most part only parochial. A national economy has a higher economic value than a municipal or parochial economy, because it means the production of a greater number of utilities at a less cost, and a richer and fuller life of the mind, with more varied activities and more intricate connexions. A national economy could only develop along with--perhaps we may say it could only develop through--a national system of politics; and the national State, which is with us to-day, and with some of whose works we are discontented, was a necessary condition of economic progress. With the coming of the national State the facile internationalism of the Middle Ages had to disappear; and as economics and politics ran into national channels, the life of the spirit, hitherto an international life, suffered the same change, and national religions, if such a thing be not a contradiction in terms, were duly born. But a national economy, a national State, a national Church were all things unknown to the Middle Ages. Its economy was a village economy: its mental culture was an international culture bestowed by a universal Church (a village culture there could not be, and with a universal Church the only possible culture was necessarily international); while, as for its politics, they were something betwixt and between--sometimes parochial, when a local feudal lord drew to himself sovereignty; sometimes national, when a strong king arose in Israel; and sometimes, under a Charlemagne, almost international.

A consideration of the linguistic factor may help to throw light on the point in question. Here again we may trace the same isolation and the same uniformity which we have also seen in the world of economics. There was an infinity of dialects, but a paucity of languages, in the Middle Ages. One is told that to-day there are dialects in the Bight of Heligoland and among the Faroes which are peculiar to a single family. Something of the same sort must have existed in the Middle Ages. Just as there were local customs of the manor, the town, and the fief, there must have been local dialects of villages and even of hamlets. But here again isolation was compatible with uniformity. There were perhaps only two languages of any general vogue in the central epoch of the Middle Ages, and they were confined by no national frontiers. First there was Latin, the language of the Church, and since learning belonged to the Church, the language of learning. Scholars used the same language in Oxford and Prague, in Paris and Bologna; and within the confines of Latin Christianity scholarship was an undivided unity. Besides Latin the only other language of any general vogue in the middle of the Middle Ages was vulgar Latin, or Romance. To Dante, writing at the close of the thirteenth century, Romance was still one idioma--even if it were trifarium, according as its 'yes' was oïl, or oc, or sì. Of the three branches of this idioma, that of oïl, or Northern France, was easily predominant. The Norman conquest of England carried it to London: the Norman conquest of Sicily carried it to Palermo: the Crusades carried it to Jerusalem. With it you might have travelled most of the mediaeval world from end to end. It was the language of courts; it was the language of chansons; it was the language of all lay culture. It was the language of England, France, and Italy; and St. Francis himself had delighted in his youth in the literature which it enshrined.

The linguistic basis of mediaeval civilization was thus Latin, either in its classical or in its vulgar form. There were of course other languages, and some of these had no small vogue. Just before the period of which we are treating--the period which extends from 1050 to 1300--Icelandic had a wide scope. It might have been heard not only in Scandinavia and the Northern Isles, but in a great part of the British Islands, in Normandy, in Russia--along the river-road that ran to Constantinople--and in Constantinople itself. But the fact remains that the linguistic basis of mediaeval thought and literature was a Latin basis. The Romance University of Paris was the capital of learning: the Romance tongue of Northern France was the tongue of society. And as the linguistic basis of mediaeval civilization was Romance, so, too, was mediaeval civilization itself. The genius of Latin Christianity was the source of its inspiration: the spirit of the Romance peoples was the breath of its being. The souvenir of the old Roman Empire provided the scheme of its political ideas; and the Holy Roman Empire, if a religious consecration had given it a new sanctity, was Roman still. Yet the irruption of the Teutons into the Empire had left its mark; and the emperor of the Middle Ages was always of Teutonic stock. It was perhaps at this point that the unity of the mediaeval scheme betrayed a fatal flaw. It would be futile to urge that the dualism which showed itself in the struggles of papacy and empire had primarily, or even to any considerable extent, a racial basis. Those struggles are struggles of principles rather than of races; they are contentions between a secular and a clerical view of life, rather than between the genius of Rome and the genius of Germany. Hildebrand stood for a free Church--a Church free from secular power because it was controlled by the papacy. Henry IV stood for the right of the secular power to use the clergy for purposes of secular government, and to control the episcopacy as one of the organs of secular administration. But the fact remains that a scheme which rested on a Teutonic emperor and a Roman pontiff was already a thing internally discordant, before these other and deeper dissensions appeared to increase the discord.

Such were the bases on which the unity of mediaeval civilization had to depend. There was a contracted world, which men could regard as a unity, with a single centre of coherence. There was a low stage of economic development, which on the one hand meant a general uniformity of life, in fief and manor and town, and on the other hand meant a local isolation, that needed, and in the unity of the Church found, some method of unification. With many varieties of dialect, there was yet a general identity of language, which made possible the development, and fostered the dissemination, of a single and identical culture. Nationalism, whether as an economic development, or as a way of life and a mode of the human spirit, was as yet practically unknown. Races might disagree; classes might quarrel; kings might fight; there was hardly ever a national conflict in the proper sense of the word. The mediaeval lines of division, it is often said, were horizontal rather than vertical. There were different estates rather than different states. The feudal class was homogeneous throughout Western Europe: the clerical class was a single corporation through all the extent of Latin Christianity; and the peasantry and the townsfolk of England were very little different from the peasantry and the townsfolk of France. We have to think of a general European system of estates rather than of any balance of rival powers.

The unity which rested on these bases begins to appear, as a reality and not only an idea, about the middle of the eleventh century, and lasts till the end of the thirteenth. That unity, as we have seen, was essentially ecclesiastical. It was the product of the Church: we may almost say that it was the Church. Before 1050 the Catholic Church, however universal in theory, had hardly been universal in fact. The period of the Frankish, the Saxon, and the early Salian emperors had been a period of what German writers call the Landeskirche. The power of the Bishop of Rome had not yet been fully established; and the great churches of Reims and Mainz and Milan were practically independent centres. Independent of the papacy, they were not independent of the lay rulers within whose dominions they lay. On the contrary, their members were deeply engaged in lay activities; they were landlords, feudatories, and officials in their various countries. In the face of these facts, the Gregorian movement of the eleventh century pursues two closely interconnected objects. It aims at asserting the universal primacy of the papacy; it aims at vindicating the freedom of the clergy from all secular power. The one aim is a means to the other: the pope cannot be universal primate, unless the clergy he controls are free from secular control; and the clergy cannot be free from secular control, unless the universal primacy of the papacy effects their liberation. Gregorianism wins a great if not a thorough triumph. It establishes the theory, and in a very large measure the practice, of ecclesiastical unity. The days of the Landeskirche are numbered: the days of the Church Universal under the universal primacy of Rome are begun. But when the universality of the Church has once been established in point of extension, it begins to be also asserted in point of intensity. Once ubiquitous, the papacy seeks to be omnicompetent. Depositary of the truth, and only depositary of the truth, by divine revelation, the Church, under the guidance of the papacy, seeks to realize the truth in every reach of life, and to control, in the light of Christian principle, every play of human activity. Learning and education, trade and commerce, war and peace, are all to be drawn into her orbit. By the application of Christian principle a great synthesis of human life is to be achieved, and the lex Christi is to be made a lex animata in terris.

This was the greatest ambition that has ever been cherished. It meant nothing less than the establishment of a civitas Dei on earth. And this kingdom of God was to be very different from that of which St. Augustine had written. His city of God was neither the actual Church nor the actual State, nor a fusion of both. It was a spiritual society of the predestined faithful, and, as such, thoroughly distinct from the State and secular society. The city of God which the great mediaeval popes were seeking to establish was a city of this world, if not of this world only. It was a fusion of the actual Church, reformed by papal direction and governed by papal control, with actual lay society, similarly reformed and similarly governed. Logically this meant a theocracy, and the bull of Boniface VIII, by which he claimed that every human creature was subject to the Roman pontiff, was its necessary outcome. But a theocracy was only a means, and a means that was never greatly emphasized in the best days of the papacy. It was the end that mattered; and the end was the moulding of human life into conformity with divine truth. The end may appear fantastic, unless one remembers the plenitude of means which stood at the command of the mediaeval Church. The seven sacraments had become the core of her organization. Central among the seven stood the sacrament of the Mass, in which bread and wine were transubstantiated into the divine body and blood of our Lord. By that sacrament men could touch God; and by its mediation the believer met the supreme object of his belief. Only the priest could celebrate the great mystery; and only those who were fit could be admitted by him to participation. The sacrament of penance, which became the antechamber, as it were, to the Mass, enabled the priest to determine the terms of admission. Outside the sacraments stood the Church courts, exercising a large measure of ethical and religious discipline over all Christians; and in reserve, most terrible of all weapons, were the powers of excommunication and interdict, which could shut men and cities from the rites of the Church and the presence of the Lord. Who shall say, remembering these things, that the aims of the mediaeval Church were visionary or impracticable?

For a time, and in some measure, they were actually accomplished. Let us look at each estate in turn, and measure the accomplishment--speaking first of the knightly world, and the Church's control of war and peace; then of the world of the commons, and the Church's control of trade and commerce; and last of the clerical world and the Church's control of learning and education.

The control of war and peace was a steady aim of the Church from the beginning of the eleventh century. The evil of feudalism was its propensity to private war. To cure that evil the Church invented the Truce of God. The Truce was a diocesan matter. The 'form' of Truce was enacted in a diocesan assembly, and the people of the diocese formed a communitas pacis for its enforcement. There was no attempt to put an absolute stop to private war; the Truce was only directed to a limitation of the times and seasons in which feuds could be waged, and a definition of the persons who were to be exempted from their menace. But from seeking to limit the fighting instinct of a feudal society, the Church soon rose to the idea of enlisting that instinct under her own banner and directing it to her own ends. So arose chivalry, which, like most of the institutions of the Middle Ages, was the invention of the Church. Chivalry was the consecration of the fighting instinct to the defence of the widow, the fatherless, and the oppressed; and by the beginning of the eleventh century liturgies already contain the form of religious service by which neophytes were initiated into knighthood. This early and religious form of chivalry (there was a later and lay form, invented by troubadour and trouvère, which was chiefly concerned with the rules for the loves of knights and ladies) culminated in the Crusades. In the Crusades we touch perhaps the most typical expression of the mediaeval spirit. Here we may see the clergy moulding into conformity with Christian principle the apparently unpromising and intractable stuff of feudal pugnacity: here we may see the papacy asserting its primacy of a united Europe by gathering Christian men together for the common purpose of carrying the flag of their faith to the grave of their Redeemer. Here the permeating influence of Christian revelation may be seen attempting to permeate even foreign policy (for what are the Crusades but the foreign policy of a Christian commonwealth controlled and directed by the papacy?); and here again even the instinct for colonial expansion, so often the root of desperate wars, was brought into line with the unity of all nations in Christ, and made to serve the cause of Him 'in whom alone is to be found the true nature of the One'.

There is another aspect of the clerical control of peace and war in the interest of Christian unity which must not be forgotten. The papacy sought to become an international tribunal. The need for such a tribunal was as much a mediaeval as it is a modern commonplace. Dante, who sought to vindicate for the emperor, rather than for the pope, the position and power of an international judge, has started the argument in famous words. 'Between any two princes, of whom the one is in no way subject to the other, disputes may arise, either by their own fault, or by that of their subjects. Judgement must therefore be given between them. And since neither can have cognizance of the other, because neither is subject to the other, there must be a third of ampler jurisdiction, to control both by the ambit of his power.' Such ampler jurisdiction, which might indeed be claimed for the emperor, but which he had never the power to exercise, was both claimed and exercised by the papacy. The papacy, which sought to enforce the Christian canon of conduct in every reach of life and every sphere of activity, would never admit that disputes between sovereign princes lay outside the rule of that canon. Innocent III, in a letter to the French bishops defending his claim to arbitrate between France and England, stands very far from any such admission. 'It belongs to our office', he argues, 'to correct all Christian men for every mortal sin, and if they despise correction, to coerce them by ecclesiastical censure. And if any shall say, that kings must be treated in one way, and other men in another, we appeal in answer to the law of God, wherein it is written, "Ye shall judge the great as the small, and there shall be no acceptance of persons among you." But if it is ours to proceed against criminal sin, we are especially bound so to do when we find a sin against peace.' Here, in these words of Innocent, the clerical claim to control of peace and war touches its highest point. In the name of a Christian principle, permeating all things, and reducing all things to unity, the dread arbitrament of war is itself to be submitted to a higher and finer arbitration. The claim was too high to be sustained or translated into effect. It is not too high to be admired.

Nor was it altogether remote from the actual life of the day. Even to the laity of the Middle Ages, war was not a mere conflict of powers, in which the strongest power must necessarily prevail. It was a conflict of rights before a watching God of battles, in which the greatest right could be trusted to emerge victorious. War between States was analogous to the ordeal of battle between individuals: it was a legal way of testing rights. Now ordeal by battle was a mode of procedure in courts of law, and a mode of procedure whose conduct and control belonged to the clergy. If, therefore, war between States is analogous to ordeal, it follows, first, that it is a legal procedure which needs a high court for its interpretation (and what court could be more competent than the papal curia?), and, next, that it is a matter which in its nature touches the clergy. Such ideas were a natural basis for the Church's attempt to control the issues of war and peace; and if we remember these ideas, we shall acquit the Church of any impracticable quixotism.

The attempt to control trade and commerce was no less lofty and no less arduous. It is perhaps still easier to stop war than to stop competition; and yet the Church made the attempt. The Christian law of love was set against the economic law of demand and supply. It was canonical doctrine that the buyer should take no more, and the seller offer no less, than the just price of a commodity--a price which would in practice depend on the cost of production. The rule for prices was also the rule for wages: the just wage was the natural complement of the just price. The prohibition of usury and of the taking of interest was another factor in the same circle of ideas. If prices and wages are both to be returns for work done, and returns of an exact equivalence, then, on the assumptions which the canonists made--that the usurer does no work, and that his loan is unproductive of any new value--it necessarily follows that no return is due, or can be justly paid, for the use of borrowed money. Work is the one title of all acquisition, and all acquisition should be in exact proportion to the amount of work done. This is the basic principle, and it is the principle of the Divine Law: In sudore frontis tuae comedes panem tuum. Once more, therefore, and once more in an unpromising and intractable material, we find the Church seeking to enforce the unity of the Christian principle and to reduce the Many to the One. In the same way, and from the same motive, that private war was to be banished from the feudal class in the country, competition--the private war of commerce--was to be eliminated from the trading classes in the towns. Nor was the attack on competition, any more than the attack on war, so much of a forlorn hope as it may seem to a modern age. Even to-day, custom is still a force which checks the operation of competition, and custom covered a far greater area in the Middle Ages than it does to-day. The rent of land, whether paid in labour or in kind, was a customary rent; and in every mediaeval community the landed class was the majority. It was an easy transition from fixed and customary rents to the fixing of just prices for commodities and services. Lay sentiment supported clerical principle. Guilds compelled their members to sell commodities at a level price, and in a spirit of collectivism endeavoured to prevent the making of corners and the practice of undercutting. Governments refused to recognize the 'laws' of demand and supply, and sought, by Statutes of Labourers, to force masters to give, and workman to receive, no more and no less than a 'just' and proper wage.

It was not only by the regulation of trade and commerce that the Church sought to penetrate the life of the towns. The friars made their homes in the towns in the thirteenth century; and the activity of the friars--Franciscan and Dominican, Austin and Carmelite--enabled the Church to exercise an influence on municipal life no less far-reaching than that which she sought to exert on the feudal classes. Towns became trustees of property for the use of the mendicant orders; and the orders of Tertiaries, which flourished among them, enabled the townsfolk to attach themselves to religious societies without quitting the pursuits of lay life. A mediaeval town--with its trade and commerce regulated, however imperfectly, by Christian principle; with its town council acting as trustee for religious orders; and with its members attached as Tertiaries to those orders--might be regarded as something of a type of Christian society; and St. Thomas, partly under the influence of these conditions, if partly also under the influence of the Aristotelian philosophy of the [Greek: polis], is led to find in the life of the town the closest approach to the ethics of Christianity.

The control of learning and education by the Church is the most peculiar and essential aspect of her activity. The control of war and peace was a matter of guiding the estate of the baronage; the control of trade and commerce was a way of directing the estate of the commons; but the control of learning and education was nothing more nor less than the Church's guidance of herself and her direction of her own estate. Studium may be distinguished from sacerdotium by mediaeval writers; but the students of a mediaeval university are all 'clergy', and the curricula of mediaeval universities are essentially clerical. All knowledge, it is true, falls within their scope; but every branch of knowledge, from dialectic to astronomy, is studied from the same angle, and for the same object--ad maiorem Dei gloriam. Here, as elsewhere, the penetrating and assimilative genius of the Church moulded and informed a matter which was not, in its nature, easily receptive of a clerical impression. The whole accumulated store of the lay learning of the ages--geometry, astronomy, and natural science; grammar and rhetoric; logic and metaphysics--this was the matter to be moulded and the stuff to be permeated; and on this stuff St. Thomas wrought the greatest miracle of genuine alchemy which is anywhere to be found in the annals of learning.

The learning which the Church had to transform was essentially the learning of the Hellenic world. Created by the centuries of nimble and inventive thought which lie between the time of Thales and that of Hipparchus, this learning had been systematized into a corpus scientiae during that age of Greek scholasticism which generally goes by the name of Hellenistic. In its systematized Hellenistic form, it had been received by the Roman world, and had become the culture of the Roman Empire. By writers ranging from Ptolemy to Boethius the body of all known knowledge had been arranged in a digest or series of pandects; and along with the legal codification of Justinian it had been handed to the Christian Church as the heritage of the ancient world. The attitude of the Church to that heritage was for long unfixed and uncertain. The logic, and still more the metaphysics, of Aristotle were not the most comfortable of neighbours to the new body of Christian revelation committed to the Church's keeping. In the hand of Berengar of Tours the methods of Greek logic proved a corrosive to the received doctrine of the Mass. In the hands of Abelard, in the Sic et Non, they served to suggest the need of criticism of the text of Christian tradition. If unity was to be preserved, a bridge must be built between the secular science of the Greeks and the religious faith of the Church. In the thirteenth century that bridge was built. Aristotle was reconciled with St. Augustine; the Organon, the Ethics, and the Politics were incorporated in the body of Christian culture; and the mediaeval instinct for unification celebrated its greatest and perhaps its most arduous triumph.

The thirteenth century thus witnessed a unity of civilization alike as a structure of life and as a content of the human mind. On the one hand, there rose a single governing scheme of society, which culminated in the universal primacy of Rome and the Roman pontiff. On the other hand, set in this scheme, and contained in this structure, there was a single stuff of thought, directed to the manifestation of the eternal glory of God. The framework we may chiefly ascribe to Gregory VII; the content to St. Thomas Aquinas. But the whole resultant unity is less the product of great personalities than of a common instinct and a common conviction. Men saw the world sub specie unitatis; and its kaleidoscopic variety was insensibly focused into a single scheme under the stress of their vision. The heavens showed forth the glory of God, and the firmament declared His handiwork. Zoology became, like everything else, a willing servant of Christianity; and bestiaria moralizata were written to show how all beasts were made for an ensample, and served for a type, of the one and only truth. All things, indeed, were types and allegories to this way of thinking; and just as every text in the Bible was an allegory to mediaeval interpretation, so all things in the world of creation, animate and inanimate, the jewel with its 'virtue' as well as the beast with its 'moral', became allegories and parables of heavenly meanings. Thus the world of perception became unreal, that it might be transmuted into the real world of faith; and symbolism like that of Hugh of St. Victor dominated men's thought, making all things (like the Mass itself, if in a less degree) into signa rei sacrae.

The unity of knowledge was thus purchased at a price. Things must cease to be studied in themselves, and must be allegorized into types, in order that they might be reduced to a unity. Perhaps the purchase of unity on terms such as these is a bad bargain; and it is at any rate obvious that in such an atmosphere scientific thought will not flourish, or man learn to adjust himself readily to the laws of his environment. From the standpoint of natural science we may readily condemn the Middle Ages and all their works; and we may prefer a single Opus of Roger Bacon to the whole of the Summa of St. Thomas. But it is necessary to judge an age which was destitute of natural science by some other criterion than that of science; nor must we hasten to say that the Middle Ages found the Universal so easily, because they ignored the Particular so absolutely. The truth is, that though mediaeval thinkers knew far more of the writings of Aristotle than they did of those of Plato, they were none the less far better Platonists than they were Aristotelians. If they had been better Aristotelians, they would have been better biologists; but as they were good Platonists, they had a conception of the purpose and system of human life in society, which perhaps excuses all, and more than all, the defects of their biology. Any survey, however brief, of the political theory of the Middle Ages will show at once its Platonic character and its incessant impulse towards the achievement of unity.

III

To mediaeval thought, as to Plato, the unity of society is an organic unity, in the sense that each member of society is an organ of the whole to which he belongs, and discharges a function at once peculiar to himself and necessary to the full life of the whole. Monasticism, so often misrepresented, attains its true meaning in the light of this conception. The monk is a necessary organ of Christian society, discharging his function of prayer and devotion for the benefit not of himself solely, or primarily, but rather of every member of that society. He prays for the sins of the whole world, and by his prayer he contributes to the realization of the end of the world, which is the attainment of salvation. In the same way the conception of a treasury of merits, afterwards perverted in the system of indulgences, belongs to an organic theory and practice of society. The merits which Christ and the saints have accumulated are a fund for the use of the whole of Christian society, a fund on which any member can draw for his own salvation, just because each is fitly joined and knit together with all the rest in a single body for the attainment of a single purpose. But we need not take isolated instances of the Platonism of mediaeval thought. The whole basic conception of a system of estates, which recurs everywhere in mediaeval life, is a Platonic conception. The estates of clergy, baronage, and commons are the Platonic classes of guardians, auxiliaries, and farmers. The Platonic creed of [Greek: to auton prattein] ('Do thine own duty') is the Christian creed of 'doing my duty in that state of life to which it shall please God to call me'. The Middle Ages are full of a spontaneous Platonism, and inspired by an anima naturaliter Platonica. The control which the mediaeval clergy exercised over Christian society in the light of divine revelation repeats the control which the guardians of Plato were to exercise over civic society in the light of the Idea of the Good. The communism of the mediaeval monastery is reminiscent of the communism of the Platonic barracks. And if there are differences between the society imagined by Plato and the society envisaged by the mediaeval Church, these differences only show that the mediaeval Church was trying to raise Platonism to a higher power, and to do so in the light of conceptions which were themselves Greek, though they belonged to a Greece posterior to the days of Plato. These conceptions--which were cherished by Stoic thinkers; which penetrated into Roman Law; and which from Roman Law flowed into the teaching and theory of the early fathers of the Church--are mainly two. One is the conception of human equality; the other, and correlative, conception is that of a single society of all the human race. The equality of men, and the universality of the city of God in which they are all contained, are conceptions which were no less present to Marcus Aurelius than they were to St. Augustine. They are conceptions which made the instinctive Platonism of the mediaeval Church even more soaring than that of Plato. While the Republic of Plato had halted at the stage of a civic society, the respublica Christiana of the Middle Ages rose to the height of a single humana civilitas. While Plato had divided the men of his Republic into classes of gold and silver and bronze, and had reserved the ecstasy of the aspect of the divine Idea for a single class, the mediaeval Church opened the mystery of the Mass and the glory of the fruition of God to all believers, and, if she believed in three estates, nevertheless gathered the three in one around the common altar of the Redeemer. Serfdom might still remain, and find tolerance, in the economic working of society; but in the Church herself, assembled together for the intimate purposes of her own life, there was 'neither bond nor free'.

The prevalence of Realism, which marks mediaeval metaphysics down to the end of the thirteenth century, is another Platonic inheritance, and another impulse to unity. The Universal is, and is a veritable thing, in which the Particular shares, and acquires its substance by its degree of sharing. The One transcends the Many; the unity of mankind is greater than the differences between men; and the university of mortal men, as Ockham writes, is one community. If there be thus one community, and one only, some negative results follow, which have their importance. In the first place, we can hardly say that the Middle Ages have any conception of the State. The notion of the State involves plurality; but plurality is ex hypothesi not to be found. The notion of the State further involves sovereignty, in the sense of final and complete control of its members by each of a number of societies. But this, again, is ex hypothesi not to be found. There is one final control, and one only, in the mediaeval system--the control of Christian principle, exerted in the last resort, and exerted everywhere, without respect of persons, by the ruling vicar of Christ. But if plurality and sovereignty thus disappear from our political philosophy, we need a new orientation of all our theory. We must forget to speak of nations. We must forget, as probably many of us would be very glad to forget, the claims of national cultures, each pretending to be a complete satisfaction and fulfilment of the national mind; and we must remember, with Dante, that culture (which he called 'civility') is the common possession of Christian humanity. We must even forget, to some extent, the existence of different national laws. It is true that mediaeval theory admitted the fact of customary law, which varied from place to place. But this customary law was hardly national: it varied not only from country to country, but also from fief to fief, and even from manor to manor. It was too multiform to be national, and too infinitely various to square with political boundaries. Nor was customary law, in mediaeval theory, anything of the nature of an ultimate command. Transcending all customs, and supreme over all enactments, rose the sovereign majesty of natural law, which is one and indivisible, and runs through all creation. 'All custom,' writes Gratian, the great canonist, 'and all written law, that are adverse to natural law, are to be counted null and void.' Here, in this conception of a natural law upholding all creation, we may find once more a Stoic legacy to the Christian Church. 'Men ought not to live in separate cities, distinguished one from another by different systems of justice'--so Zeno the Stoic had taught--'but there should be one way and order of life, like that of a single flock feeding on a common pasture.' Zeno, like St. Paul, came from Cilicia. Like St. Paul, he taught the doctrine of the one society, in which there was neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Greek nor barbarian. We shall not do wrong to recognize in his teaching, and in that of his school, one of the greatest influences, outside the supreme and controlling influence of the Christian principle itself, which made for the dominance of the idea of unity in mediaeval thought.

Before we proceed to draw another negative conclusion from the principle of the one community, we must enter a brief caveat in regard to the conclusion which has just been drawn. We cannot altogether take away the State from the Middle Ages by a stroke of the pen and the sweep of a paradox. There were states in mediaeval Europe, and there were kings who claimed and exercised imperium. These things caused the theorists, and particularly the Roman lawyers, no little trouble. It was difficult to reconcile the unity of the imperium with the multiplicity of kings. Some had recourse to the theory of delegation, and this seems to be the theory of the De Monarchia of Dante. But there was one contemporary of Dante who said a wise thing, prophetic of the future. Rex est in regno suo, wrote Bartolus of Sassoferrato, imperator regni sui. In that sentence we may hear the cracking of the Middle Ages. When kings become 'entire emperors of their realms' (the phrase was used in England by Richard II, and the imperial style was affected by Henry VIII), unity soon prepares to fly out of the window. But she never entirely took flight until the Reformation shattered the fabric of the Church, and made kings into popes as well as emperors in their dominions.

We may now turn to draw another conclusion from the mediaeval principle of unity. To-day the world recognizes, and has recognized for nearly four centuries, not only a distinction between States, but also a distinction between two societies in each State--the secular and the religious. These two societies may have different laws (for instance, in the matter of marriage), and conflicts of duties and of jurisdictions may easily arise in consequence. The State may permit what the Church forbids; and in that case the citizen who is also a churchman must necessarily revolt against one or other of the societies to which he belongs. The conflict between the two societies and the different obligations which they impose was a conflict unknown to the Middle Ages. Kings might indeed be excommunicated, and in that event their subjects would be compelled to decide whether they should disobey excommunicated king or excommunicating pope. But that was only a conflict between two different allegiances to two different authorities; it was not a conflict between two different memberships of two different societies. The conflict between the two societies--Church and State--was one which could hardly arise in the Middle Ages, because there was only a single society, an undivided Christian commonwealth, which was at one and the same time both Church and State. Because there was only one society, baptism counted as admission both to churchmanship and to citizenship, which were one thing, and one only, in the Christian commonwealth; and for the same reason excommunication, which shut the offender from all religious life, excluded him equally and by the same act from every civil right. The excommunicated person could not enter either the Church or the law court; could not receive either the eucharist or a legacy; could not own either a cure of souls or an acre of soil. Civil right and religious status implied one another; and not only was extra ecclesiam nulla salus a true saying, but extra ecclesiam nullum ius would also be very near the truth. Here again is a reason for saying that the State as such can hardly be traced in the Middle Ages. The State is an organization of secular life. Even if it goes beyond its elementary purpose of security for person and property, and devotes itself to spiritual purposes, it is concerned with the development of the spirit in its mortal existence, and confined to the expansion of the mind in the bounds of a mortal society. The Middle Ages thought more of salvation than of security, and more of the eternal society of all the faithful, united together in Christ their Head, than of any passing society of this world only. They could recognize kings, who bore the sword for the sake of security, and did justice in virtue of their anointing. But kings were not, to their thinking, the heads of secular societies. They were agents of the one divine commonwealth--defenders of the Faith, who wielded the secular sword for the furtherance of the purposes of God. Thus there was one society, if there were two orders of ministering agents; and thus, though regnum and sacerdotium might be distinguished, the State and the Church could not be divided. Stephen of Tournai, a canonist of the twelfth century, recognizes the two powers; but he only knows one society, under one king. That society is the Church: that king is Christ.

Under conditions such as these--with the plurality of States unrecognized by theory, even if it existed in practice, and with distinction between State and Church unknown and unenforced--we may truly say with a German writer, whose name I should like to mention honoris causa, Professor Tröltsch, that 'there was no feeling for the State; no common and uniform dependence on a central power; no omnicompetent sovereignty; no equal pressure of a public civil law; no abstract basis of association in formal and legal rules--or at any rate, so far as anything of the sort was present, it was a matter only for the Church, and in no wise for the State'. So far as social life was consciously articulated in a scheme, the achievement was that of the clergy, and the scheme was that of the Church. The interdependencies and associations of lay life--kingdoms and fiefs and manors--were only personal groupings, based on personal sentiments of loyalty and unconscious elements of custom. A mixture of uniformity and isolation, as we have seen, was the characteristic of these groupings: they were at once very like one another, throughout the extent of Western Europe, and (except for their connexion in a common membership of the Church Universal) very much separated from one another. But with one at any rate of these groupings--the kingdom, which in its day was to become the modern State--the future lay; and we shall perhaps end our inquiry most fitly by a brief review of the lines of its future development.

The development of the kingdom into the State was largely the work of the lawyers. The law is a tenacious profession, and in England at any rate its members have exercised a large influence on politics from the twelfth to the twentieth century--from the days of Glanville, the justiciar of Henry II, to the days of Mr. Asquith, the prime minister of George V. It is perhaps in England that we may first see the germs of the modern State emerging to light under the fostering care of the royal judges. Henry II is something of a sovereign: his judges formulate a series of commands, largely in the shape of writs, which became the common law of the land; and in the Constitutions of Clarendon we may already see the distinction between Church and State beginning to be attempted. With a sovereign, a law, and a secular policy all present, we may begin to suspect the presence of a State. In France also a similar development, if somewhat later than the English, occurs at a comparatively early date. By the end of the thirteenth century the legists of Philippe le Bel have created something of étatisme in their master's dominions. The king's court begins to rule the land; and proud of its young strength it enters the lists against Boniface VIII, the great prophet of the Church Universal, who proclaimed that every human creature was subject to the Roman pontiff. The collapse of Boniface at Anagni in 1303 is the traditional date of the final defeat of the mediaeval papacy. Everywhere, indeed, the tide seemed on the turn at the close of the thirteenth century. The Crusades ended with the fall of Acre in 1291. The suppression of the great international order of the Templars twenty years later marked a new leap of the encroaching waves. The new era of the modern national State might seem already to have begun.

But tides move slowly and by gradual inches. It needed two centuries more before the conditions in which the modern State could flourish had been fully and finally established. Economic conditions had to change--a process always gradual and slow; and a national economy based on money had to replace the old local economy based on kind. Languages had to be formed, and local dialects had to be transformed into national and literary forms, before national States could find the means of utterance. The revival of learning had to challenge the old clerical structure of knowledge, and to set free the progress of secular science, before the minds of men could be readily receptive of new forms of social structure and new modes of human activity. But by 1500 the work of preparation had been largely accomplished. The progress of discovery had enlarged the world immeasurably. The addition of America to the map had spiritual effects which it is difficult to estimate in any proper terms. If the old world of the Mediterranean regions could be thought into a unity, it was more difficult to reduce to the One the new world which swam into men's ken. Still more burdened with fate for the future generations was the vast volume of commerce, necessarily conducted on a national basis, which the age of discoveries went to swell. Meanwhile, men had begun to think and to write in national languages. Already by the reign of Richard II the dialect of the East Midlands, which was spoken in the capital and the universities, had become a literary language in which Chaucer and Wyclif had spoken to all the nation. Still earlier had come the development of Italian, and a little more than a century after the days of Wyclif, Luther was to give to Germany a common speech and a common Bible. It was little wonder that in such times the old unity of the Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages shivered into fragments, or that, side by side with a national language, there developed--at any rate in England and in Germany--a national Church. The unity of a common Roman Church and a common Romance culture was gone. Cuius regio eius religio. To each region its religion; and to each nation, we may add, its national culture. The Renaissance may have begun as a cosmopolitan movement, and have found in Erasmus a cosmopolitan representative. It ended in national literatures; and a hundred years after Erasmus, Shakespeare was writing in England, Ariosto in Italy, and Lope de Vega in Spain.

In the sixteenth century the State was active and doing after its kind. It was engaged in war. France was fighting Spain: England was seeking to maintain the balance: Turkey was engaged in the struggle. It is a world with which we are familiar--a world of national languages, national religions, national cultures, national wars, with the national State behind all, upholding and sustaining every form of national activity. But unity was not entirely dead. Science might still transcend the bounds of nations, and a Grotius or Descartes, a Spinoza or a Leibniz, fill the European stage. Religion, which divided, might also unite; and a common Calvinism might bind together the Magyars of Hungary and the French of Geneva, the Dutchman and the Scot. Leyden in the seventeenth century could serve, as The Hague in the twentieth century may yet serve, if in a different way, for the meeting ground of the nations; it could play the part of an international university, and provide a common centre of medical science and classical culture. But the old unity of the Middle Ages was gone--gone past recall. Between those days and the new days lay a gulf which no voice or language could carry. Much was lost that could never be recovered; and if new gold was added to the currency of the spirit, new alloys were wrought into its substance. It would be a hard thing to find an agreed standard of measurement, which should cast the balance of our gain and loss, or determine whether the new world was a better thing than the old. One will cry that the old world was the home of clericalism and obscurantism; and another will say in his bitterness that the new world is the abode of two other evil spirits--nationalism and commercialism. One thing is perhaps certain. We cannot, as far as human sight can discern, ever hope to reconstruct unity on the old basis of the Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages. Yet need is upon us still--need urgent and importunate--to find some unity of the spirit in which we can all dwell together in peace. Some have hoped for unity in the sphere of economics, and have thought that international finance and commerce would build the foundations of an international polity. Their hopes have had to sleep, and a year of war has shown that 'a synchronized bank-rate and reacting bourses' imply no further unity. Some again may hope for unity in the field of science, and may trust that the collaboration of the nations in the building of the common house of knowledge will lead to co-operation in the building of a greater mansion for the common society of civilized mankind. But nationalism can pervert even knowledge to its own ends, turning anthropology to politics, and chemistry to war. There remains a last hope--the hope of a common ethical unity, which, as moral convictions slowly settle into law, may gradually grow concrete in a common public law of the world. Even this hope can only be modest, but it is perhaps the wisest and the surest of all our hopes. Idem scire is a good thing; but men of all nations may know the same thing, and yet remain strangers one to another. Idem velle idem nolle in re publica, ea demum firma amicitia est. The nations will at last attain firm friendship one with another in the day when a common moral will controls the scope of public things. And when they have attained this friendship, then on a far higher level of economic development and with an improvement by each nation of its talent which is almost entirely new--they will have found again, if in a different medium, something of the unity of mediaeval civilization.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

W.J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History, vol. i, pt. 2, ch. 3; vol. i, pt. 2, ch. 6. Longmans.

Lord Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire. Macmillan.

A.J. and R.W. Carlyle, Mediaeval Political Theory in the West. W. Blackwood.

H.W.C. Davis, Mediaeval Europe (Home University Library). Williams & Norgate.

Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition), articles on 'Crusades' and 'Empire'.

J.N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, Appendix I. Longmans.

Bede Jarrett; Socialist Theories in the Middle Ages. T.C. and E.C. Jack.

E. Jenks, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages. Murray.

F.W. Maitland, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, translated from Gierke's Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht. Maitland. Cambridge University Press.

R.L. Poole, Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought. Williams & Norgate.

H. Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. Clarendon Press.

A.L. Smith, Church and State in the Middle Ages. Clarendon Press.

H.O. Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind. Macmillan.

E. Tröltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen (II. Kapitel).

P. Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe. Harper.

FOOTNOTES:

UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LAW

You know the story of Sophocles' Antigone: how, when two brothers disputed the throne of Thebes, one, Polynices, was driven out and brought a foreign host against the city. Both brothers fall in battle. Their uncle takes up the government and publishes an edict that no one shall give burial to the traitor who has borne arms against his native land. The obligation to give or allow decent burial, even to an enemy, was one which the Greeks held peculiarly sacred. Yet obedience to the orders of lawful authority is an obligation binding on every citizen. No one dares to disregard the king's order save the dead man's sister. She is caught in the act and brought before the king. 'And thou,' he says, 'didst indeed dare to transgress this law?' 'Yes,' answers Antigone, 'for it was not Zeus that published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the Justice who dwells with the Gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of to-day or yesterday but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth.'

There you have the assertion of a law supreme and binding on all men, eternal, not to be set aside by human enactment.

And now turn to this passage from the traveller and historian Herodotus, an almost exact contemporary of Sophocles. He has been telling how Cambyses, king of the Persians, has been wantonly insulting the religion and customs of the Egyptians. 'The man must have been mad,' he says:

'For if one was to set men of all nations to make a choice of the best laws out of all the laws there are, each one upon consideration would choose those of his own country: so far do men go in thinking their own laws the best. Therefore it is not likely that any but a madman would cast ridicule on such things. And that all men do think thus about their laws may be shown by many proofs, and above all by this story. For when Darius was king he called to him the Greeks who were at his court and asked them, 'How much money would you take to eat your fathers when they die?' And they answered that they would not do this at any price. After this Darius called the men of an Indian tribe called the Kallatiai, who eat their parents, and asked them in the presence of the Greeks, who were told by an interpreter what was said, 'How much money would you take to burn with fire your fathers when they die?' And they cried with a great voice that he should speak no such blasphemy. Thus it is that men think, and I hold that Pindar spoke rightly in his poem when he said that law was king over all.'

There you have law, king over men and gods, but a capricious monarch commanding here this, there that.

This capricious arbitrary aspect of law was a thing which much impressed the Greeks. They contrasted the varying, artificial arrangements made by mankind with the constancy and simplicity of nature. We speak of nature and convention; they contrasted things that are by nature with things that are by law. It was a contrast that bore fruit later on.

Now law, whose arbitrariness and variety so much impressed the Greeks was the law not so much of this place or that, as of this or that community and its members. This is a conception quite different from that of the modern world. We may paraphrase 'English law' by saying the law of England, because it is the law which will be applied (with, it may be, some exceptions or modifications) by the English courts to all persons, be they English or aliens, who come before them. But Athenian law is not in this sense the law of Athens, nor, to begin with, is Roman law the law of Rome. What we find is a law of Athenian or Roman citizens. The stranger to the city is a stranger to its law. As a matter of principle he is without rights by that law. His life is not protected by the blood-feud which his family can pursue, or by the compensation with which it may be bought off. His marriage with a citizen will be no marriage, or at best a sort of half marriage. He can acquire no land within the city's territory, and what goods he brings with him are pretty much at the mercy of the first taker.

Such, at any rate, is the theory of the 'law of citizens'.

We need not, it is true, believe that it was logically formulated in primitive times and ruthlessly applied. Some of its applications were the result of positive legislation due to a growing consciousness of the self-sufficiency of the city state and of the privileges of citizenship, as when Athens passed a law excluding from citizenship the offspring of citizens who had married foreign wives. But in its broad outlines the principle is sufficiently borne out by the exceptions which were necessary to make human intercourse possible. The stranger within your gates is protected just because he is within your gates, and you throw your protection about him, as is indeed your duty, for suppliants and strangers come from Zeus. The foreigner, even at a distance, may have a citizen as representative who can and will defend his rights. A stranger may be allowed to take up a permanent residence in the city, and by the mediation of a patron or guardian enjoy private rights not much inferior to those of a citizen. His legal position will not be very different from that of a woman citizen, who needs the like mediation. Cities may, again, by treaty confer on each other's citizens reciprocal rights of legal protection.

In the middle of the third century B.C., Rome, after its first successful war against Carthage, took special measures to deal with the problem of the alien litigant. The great and growing commerce which came from all parts of the Mediterranean called for something more than a mere admission to treaty privileges. A special officer was from henceforth appointed to deal with the law-suits to which foreigners were parties, and the judgement was given by a body (which we may compare with our jury) which might include fellow-citizens of the foreign suitor.

But here a difficulty arose: what law was to be applied to a transaction between a Roman and a foreigner, or between two foreigners? The Roman law, the law of citizens, had been codified two centuries earlier, and its outline had been hardened by the practice of two centuries. The forms for a transfer of property, for instance, were rigid and solemn; the foreigner would hardly know them, and if he did, his alien hand could not effectively do the prescribed acts nor his alien mouth speak the almost sacred words. The answer was that behind the forms of the law of this city or that, there was 'a law of the men of all nations'. The common elements in the ordinary transactions of life, in whatever form they were clothed, could be taken into account and given effect to. Thus, side by side with the ownership according to the law of Roman citizens, the solemn words of promise which only a Roman citizen could utter, the marriage which only a Roman citizen could enter into, there might be property, contract, marriage to which any one, citizen or alien, might be a party.

This 'law of the men of all nations' (ius gentium) was of course not an international law, it was a law administered by Roman officers, and it was coloured by Roman conceptions, however much it may have drawn from a comparison of foreign laws with which the Romans were brought into contact. In turn it reacted upon the more narrow law of Roman citizens (ius civile), broadening its conceptions and enabling it to free itself from primitive formalism. It also made easier the task of Roman governors who were called upon to administer the various laws of the different countries which came to form the Roman empire.

The gradual extension of the citizenship (completed at the end of the second century A.D.) to the whole of the inhabitants of the empire made possible, at least in outward appearance, the application of a uniform system of law throughout what was then the civilized world, though beneath an apparent uniformity local traditions and customs survived to the end, at any rate in the east. The 'civil law', as the Roman law in its final form has been called down to the present day, consists of elements of the narrowly Roman and the more universal law inextricably interlaced.

This Roman solution of the problem of the foreign litigant is of much more than merely practical importance. The Stoic philosophy which grew up amid the decay of the old city life, whose adherents spoke of themselves as citizens of the world, had fastened upon the old antithesis of law (or convention) and nature, and formed the conception of a law of nature, which should have a reasonable basis and a validity superior to the arbitrariness of the city law. To this ideal conception the Roman law of the men of all nations gave a body and a reality. Stoicism became the 'established' philosophy of Rome, and Roman lawyers well-nigh identified the 'ius gentium' with the ideal law of nature, describing it as that which natural reason has established among all men. Yet for at least one of the great classical lawyers, whose words have been enshrined in Justinian's legislation, the identification was incomplete. By nature, it was said, all men are free, and mankind has departed from what natural reason requires, in permitting slavery. Thus the law of nature must be sought in something more universal than the practice of mankind. More than fifteen hundred years later in an English court an argument against the recognition of the rights of a slave-owner was successfully founded on the law of nature.

Before the Roman law had been put (at Constantinople) into the final shape in which it is preserved to us, the Roman empire in the west had already been broken up by barbarian invasions. The invaders brought with them their tribal laws and customs, rude, often cruel, narrow rather than simple, for simplicity is the work of civilization. They did not understand, and could not adopt, the law of the world into which they had come. Yet neither could they, if they would, force their laws upon the conquered inhabitants. Among these the old civilization lingered on in a degenerate form, and with it the Roman law. One of the first things that happened was that the conquerors drew up for their Roman subjects short codes of the Roman law as it survived in a debased form, as they drew up statements of their own law for their followers. For a long time each man, according to the community to which he belonged, had a 'personal' law. As late as A.D. 850 we hear that in France it might happen that five men met together and each would have a different law. Of course such a state of things means before very long that there must be at any rate one set of common legal rules which must be applied throughout a territory, namely rules to decide which kind of personal law is to be used when there is a dispute between two persons whose personal law is different.

Gradually the different populations within the same area coalesce, and law from being personal becomes local. But the local area will not be the same for all purposes. The law or custom which determines the rights of the small, often unfree or half-free tenant, whether as between him and his neighbour or as between him and his lord, may extend no further than a very small area, such as in England we call a manor. The law by which great men held their land from a king, though perhaps not uniform throughout the kingdom, will cover a much larger area. The fact that a great man may hold land in far distant places, it may be in different kingdoms, and that men of this class have connexions with different parts of Western Europe will lead to the formation of common notions of feudal law, which make possible even the scientific study of a law of feuds, though no complete uniformity was ever attained.

England was the first western country to attain political unity with a territory substantially the same as at the present day; and the determination of the English kings that in the more important matters justice should be done throughout the land in the king's name, either by his courts at Westminster or by judges sent by him to the counties, secured the formation of an English Common Law which left comparatively little play for local custom, and which at an early time became strong enough to resist attempts to introduce foreign law. As early as the time of Henry III the barons proclaimed with one voice that they would not have the laws of England altered in favour of a rule--the legitimation of bastards by the subsequent marriage of their parents--which in one form or another has been adopted in Western Christendom, and even in the neighbouring kingdom of Scotland.

In France political unity was reached only later and bit by bit, and when it came the difference of law in the various provinces was too firmly established to make uniformity possible until the time of the Revolution. In Germany the shadowy unity of the Holy Roman Empire was never enough to afford any effective central administration of justice. National law in the strict sense was impossible under such conditions: the most that can be expected is such a degree of unity as results from common traditions inherited from more primitive times, and a community of language and national feeling.

Amid local and national diversities of law there were at any rate two unifying influences, the Roman and the Canon law. In some parts of Europe, as in the South of France and Italy, the traditions of the Roman law had never died out, and in a debased form, with much admixture of the law of the invaders, it had come to form the basis of the local law. In others it was the barbarian law which formed the groundwork. But just as behind the new languages, whether in the main founded on Latin or on Teutonic, Latin remained the medium of intercourse between the countries of the West, and the instrument of thought and learning, so Roman law remained a tradition which was ever ready to exert an influence. It is not only in law courts that law is learnt and developed. Transactions have to be drawn up in writing, and will largely be made in Latin, and founded on precedents. The grants of land to and from ecclesiastical bodies especially will be in a form which borrows much from Roman or romanesque models; and they will form models for the transactions of others. Even the formulation of native law in the early codes will be carried out by men who know of no written law except the Roman. In the twelfth century Roman law becomes a subject of University study throughout Western Europe, in Italy, at Paris, even at Oxford, and forms a part of that international learning which scholars carry from land to land. Men trained in the Roman law rise to high positions in the public service. As judges and administrators they will not forget what they have learnt as students or taught as doctors. Yet it would be easy to exaggerate its influence, great as it was. It was certainly more as a form and method of legal thought than as an actual source of legal rules that it made itself felt, for instance, in our own country, and the strength and cohesion which it helped to give to our law enabled that law later to resist its further advance.

The Canon law was the law of the Western Church, a truly international society. It was formed largely on the model of the Roman law, and it largely borrowed from it, though it is full of non-Roman elements. It governed not merely what we should call purely ecclesiastical matters, but dealt or attempted to deal with other things, such as marriage and the disposition of the goods of the deceased. Our own law of marriage and divorce, and of probate of wills, has a history which goes back to the ecclesiastical law of the Middle Ages. Like the Roman law it exercised an influence as a model and a repository of maxims, all the greater because in every country it was a law in actual force within a sphere of which the boundaries were constantly being disputed between the lay and the church powers.

The beginnings of modern Europe with which we associate such things as the revival of learning and the Reformation brought with them on the Continent the event which is known as the reception of Roman law. The traditions of the ancient world had been seen in mediaeval times through mediaeval eyes, and had been moulded to mediaeval needs. The new age insisted on going back direct to the classical tradition. It was the actual Roman law of Justinian, not the Roman law as interpreted by mediaeval commentators, that was to be studied and applied. The break-up of the institutions of the Middle Ages, the growth of absolute monarchical power, the centralization of government, all favoured the tendency. Roman law contained doctrines eminently pleasing to an absolute ruler, e.g. 'the decision of the monarch has the force of law'. In Germany above all, where law was divided into countless local customs, the movement had its fullest effect. Roman law comes to be the law which is to be applied in the absence of positive enactment or justifiable custom. The native law finds itself driven to plead for its life, and is lucky if it can satisfy the conditions which are required to enable it to continue as a recognized custom. In every country of the West outside England, in greater or less degree, the Roman law comes in as something which will at least fill up the gaps, and will purge or remodel the native law. Even in Scotland texts of the Roman law may be quoted as authorities. The strength of our own law, and the successful resistance of our public institutions to monarchical power saved us alone from a 'reception', in the continental sense, of Roman law. And even our Blackstone will quote Roman law with respect where it tends to confirm our own rules.

If this reception was a movement which brought about a greater unity in the form and substance of the laws of Western Europe, there was another factor at work which tended in the opposite direction. The claims of the Empire to universal authority become more and more unreal: the claims of the Pope are either rejected entirely, or the ecclesiastical sphere is strictly delimited. The State becomes sovereign. For this purpose it makes no difference whether it is a High Court of Parliament or an absolute monarch which is the supreme authority: law comes to be thought of as the command of a sovereign person or assembly. 'No law', we are told, 'can be unjust', for law is the standard of justice, and there is no other standard by which the justice of law can be measured. The fact that there is in every State a sovereign power which can make and unmake the law at its pleasure makes possible the creation of a uniform law for all the subjects of a State, and so far as the State coincides with the nation, makes for the creation of a national unity in law. Thus Frederick the Great gave a code to Prussia, thus Napoleon gave France a code which swept away the diversities of the provincial customs; yet it served more than merely national purposes, for it found its way not only into the countries conquered by him, where it survived his conquests, but even into lands where he never held sway. Our French fellow-citizens in Quebec use an adaptation of it as a statement of their law. It took longer before Germany as a whole obtained a uniformity of law. The very strength of the national aspirations roused by the war against Napoleon stood for a time in the way of codification. The great German lawyer of that time, Savigny, thought of national law as a half-unconscious product of the national feeling of right. The Code of Napoleon had been a revolutionary code, founded (imperfectly, no doubt) on the doctrines of the rights of man; codification for Germany would mean the adoption of something abstract, not specifically national. It was only a century of extraordinary fruitful learned activity, bringing with it at the same time a new and intense study of the Roman law, and a revival of the knowledge and application of the native conceptions of law, that made possible the German civil code which came into force fifteen years ago.

England has never seriously undertaken the work of codification, and its law, uniform and national already in the Middle Ages, has become in the modern world something far wider than a merely national law. The English settlers in the new world brought their law with them. To-day English law, modified no doubt by State and Federal legislation, is the Common Law of the great republic of the United States. The colonies which still remain within our Empire are territories of the English law, save where, as in South Africa or Quebec, civilized settlers had already established and retained their own law. Throughout these lands, it matters little under which flag, an English lawyer finds the Courts speaking a language which he understands.

Thus it came about that the world, which derives its civilization from Western Europe, may be divided into lands of the English law, and lands where in outward form at least the law is Roman. And yet we must not make too much of this division. In the first place it cuts across national boundaries. It unites us with the United States of America, it separates us from some of our own colonies while it unites them with continental Europe. In the second place law is, like language, a form of thought; and diversity of form, though it hinders, does not prevent a unity of substance.

Among the forces which have made for unity something should be said of the conception of a law of nature. The phrase has been out of fashion in this country since the days of Bentham and Austin, who laid stress upon the positive, one might say arbitrary, character of the only law which they would recognize as law in the proper sense of the word. I am not concerned here to discuss its philosophical validity. But it has never been lost sight of. It is one of the inheritances of the Roman law tradition. Alike in the Middle Ages, and since their close, it has been the subject of speculation and an influence guiding the legislator, the thinker, and the administrator of law. There is a whole literature upon it on the Continent. It bulks pretty largely in Blackstone: you can see its influence on the judges of the eighteenth century in this country; the founders of the American Republic put a good deal of it into their constitution, and American judges will still refer to it without shame. What it really means is a standard by which the law here and now may be judged, a standard founded on the needs of human nature. That the standard becomes a different one, as the needs and possibilities of humanity develop, has not prevented the seeking after such a standard.

It is perhaps only another way of putting the same thing to say that law has developed and is developing constantly by reference to the pursuit of ends more or less consciously arrived at by mankind. So far as these ends are common, and I take it that in the main, amid national and individual diversity and conflict they are common ends, law has been formed for their attainment. On the whole what men have asked law to do for them has been the same at any given stage in civilization. The eighteenth century asked for liberty, property, and happiness. We are putting a rather different meaning, or perhaps a different stress on the words, not only here but throughout the civilized world, and the main movements of legal change are in the same direction everywhere.

One word about the two kinds of law known as Public and Private International law.

The fact that the laws of different countries are different gives rise to problems whenever the Courts of one country have to deal with a set of facts where some foreign element is involved, for instance a citizen or an inhabitant of another country, or property which is in another country, or a contract or transaction which took place abroad. Now we have long got past the stage at which the Courts could simply disregard the foreign element, could say this man is a foreigner, therefore he has no rights; or this event took place abroad, and therefore we will treat it as if it had never happened. On the other hand it will not do for the Court to apply simply its own law. Grave injustice would be done, for instance, if a transaction made on the faith of law which will give a certain effect to it, were treated as made under another law which will give it a different effect or no effect at all. For this reason the Courts of every country have formed rules (sometimes called Private International Law; sometimes, and as some hold, more properly, called 'Conflict of Laws') by which they determine how far, where a foreign element is involved, the foreign law is to be carried out rather than the law which the Court applies in ordinary cases. These rules are not the same in every country, because differences of opinion are possible as to what justice requires. But the very existence of such rules shows that the Courts hold that the world of law is one, however much diversified, and that no one territorial law can blindly go on its way without taking account of its neighbours.

International law in the more proper sense of the word, that is Public International Law, or the law which governs the relations between States, is a very different thing. Something of the kind was not unknown in the ancient world; the Greeks, for instance, had rules against the poisoning of wells, the proper treatment of envoys, and the making and keeping of treaties. But in its modern form it dates just from the time when States were waking up to the consciousness of sovereignty, and when the horrors of the wars which followed the Reformation showed that even sovereign powers ought to conform to some rules of conduct. It has been the work in its origin of writers and teachers of law, and has been built up more recently by agreement between States. Unlike the law between man and man, which modern states enforce by organized compulsion, there is no standing organization whose business it is to see that it is kept. It is not true to say that for this reason it is not law at all, for in primitive times the recognized rules of private law were enforced not by State sanction but by the action of individuals, with the support of the opinions and at times the active help of their neighbours and friends. But a law which is defied with success and impunity is no law. The reality and strength of International Law has lain in the fact that its breach brought at least the risk of suffering, through the common disapprobation of civilized nations; its preservation and maintenance for the future must lie in a certainty of disaster, not greatly less than that which awaits the transgressor of private law.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Jethro Brown, The Austinian Theory of Law. Murray.

Maine, Ancient Law. Murray.

Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law. Cambridge University Press.

Vinogradoff, Common Sense in Law. Home University Library, Williams & Norgate.

Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe. Harper's Library of Living Thought.

FOOTNOTES:

THE COMMON ELEMENTS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART

For some hundred years past it has been common to lay great stress upon the importance of national characteristics in art. This has been very natural, for they represent one main aspect and justification of the revolt against the conception of the one permanent and immutable standard of perfection of the Neo-classicists of the Renaissance. Lessing and Herder, who were the critical protagonists of the new world, had indeed a knowledge and admiration of ancient art which was probably superior to that of the classicists, but they refused to admit that art was bound to follow the forms of antiquity, and maintained rather that its forms would necessarily change with the changing conditions of the world, and with the varying characteristics of different nationalities or races.

From their time down to our own, then, this conception of art, as being coloured or affected strongly and continually by nationality, has become almost a commonplace of criticism, and it will not be denied that there is real importance in the conception. For though nothing is really art which is not distinctive and personal and unique, yet just so far as the personality of the artist is conditioned by his nationality, so far also will his artistic work reflect the characteristics of his nation or country. And yet, while this is true, it really needs very little consideration to see that when we consider a great work of art, we are very little concerned with the question of the nationality of the artist, but with something which is deeper and larger than his nationality. The great artist no doubt represents life under the forms or terms of his concrete experience, but it is life and the world itself which he represents. He is not greatly concerned with the merely superficial or passing aspects of human nature and the world, but with that which is essential and continuing under these terms.

It may indeed be urged that there is some real and fundamental difference between the art of the East and that of the West, but as we have come to know eastern art better, we have become more doubtful even of this, and are rather impressed with the unity of the artistic expression even of East and West. I am far from wishing to say that nationality or race has no significance in art, but I think that we have been in danger of greatly exaggerating its importance. I am at least certain that we have very constantly made too much of the supposed differences in the literature and art of the different European countries, and that we must make clear to ourselves that European art and literature are really one.

It is not unimportant to observe this at the present time, to consider whether literature and art are dividing or uniting forces. As far as we can understand, what indeed seems a little unintelligible, the Germans desire to impress upon Europe their culture or civilization, an attempt as absurd as it would be impossible, for German culture is, after all, only a part of the great European civilization, and the part cannot take the place of the whole. But on the other hand it is not less important for us to understand that what we desire to do is not to destroy those elements which Germany contributes to European civilization, but only that they should take their natural and appropriate place in that greater unity which is enriched and enlarged by the contribution of every separate national society. European art is one; that is, the common characteristics are far more important than the national differences. And further, we often take to be national, characteristics which happen to show themselves at one time in one place, while they may have existed at another time in another place. The history of European art is in a great measure the history of successive influences or movements which were for the most part common to all Europe, but which did not always exactly synchronize in the different European countries.

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So far as there is such a thing as nationalism in literature it is wholly modern, while in mediaeval literature and art there is hardly anything of it. This may seem strange to those who imagine that it is only the railway and the steamship which have brought the world together, but the truth is that the movement of ideas and fashions was probably at least as rapid in the Middle Ages as it is to-day. However this may be, the fact is, I think, clear, that when we come to examine mediaeval literature we find that it is practically homogeneous, that whether we look at it in England or France, in Germany or in Scandinavia, it has practically the same qualities. I do not speak of Italy yet, for Italian literature is the latest-born of the great European literatures, it has not at least come down to us in any forms earlier than those of the thirteenth century.

Mediaeval literature is known to us primarily under two forms, the heroic epic and the romance, and it is to these that we must first turn our attention. We know the heroic epic in different languages throughout a period which extends roughly from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. The earliest example is the English Beowulf; among the latest are the German Nibelungenlied and some of the French Chansons de Geste, which belong to the end of the twelfth century. This epic literature is not least interesting to us because it has, as far as we can judge, no trace of that great classical influence of which you have already heard, and which plays so great a part in the later developments of European literature. Now what is the epic? Its materials are the stories of northern mythology, the traditions of the great migrations which overthrew the Roman empire in the west, and the legends which grew up round the name of Charles the Great. They are stories of the gods and demigods, of the Burgundian and the Hun, of the English people possibly while still settled on the Baltic coasts, of the conflicts of the Frank and the Saracen, of the earliest settlers in Iceland; and they vary in their temper and their tone.

But they all represent the sense of the glory and splendour of the great fighting man, of the stout heart, which rises with rising danger and is never so great or so splendid as when it faces overwhelming odds and defies the inexorable fates. The epic poet is so possessed by this sense of the greatness of human nature that it does not matter much even whether the man is wrong or perverse: he loves the obstinacy of Roland, who will not, till too late, sound his horn to call Charlemagne and his armies, but prefers to face the enemy, and if need be to die, by himself, rather than to ask for help; he is filled with the sense of the magnificence of the stark figure of Hagen, who had indeed treacherously murdered the great Siegfried, but whose heart is so high and his hand so heavy, that when he is overpowered, and Chriemhilda at last avenges upon him the murder of her husband, the old knight standing by kills Chriemhilda herself--it was not meet that so great a fighter should be slain by a woman. These are the men of the epics.

And beside them stand the figures of women great and gracious, women for whose love men die and perish, but who themselves also can hate and love passionately and fiercely. It has sometimes been said by those who only know the epics in one or other of the various languages, that women and the love of women have no place in the epic, but belong to the romance, but this is a mistake. In the mediaeval epic there is little talk about emotion, but in the Nibelungenlied and in some of the Icelandic sagas the woman is, like Helen in the Homeric epic, the motive and source of all the action.

The epic is the story of great and heroic figures, abstracted in that sense from the common or ordinary circumstances of life, but the background of the action is always realistic and even detailed in its realism, so that, just as again in the Homeric poems, we can frequently reconstruct the life and manners of the time to which the poems belong from that which they tell us. And it is impossible to say that there is any really national difference between the epics as we find them in different languages; they are indeed the expression of the temperament and personality of the great artists who produced them, and they are each unique and individual in proportion to the greatness of their authors, but in their general characteristics they are the same.

There are few changes in the history of literature more remarkable than that which came over European art in the later years of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth. The epic is concerned with the world of action, the romance is occupied almost exclusively with the world of feeling and emotion. For this is the real character of the romance. It has sometimes been said that the essence of the romance lies in the strange and mysterious circumstances of the world, in stories of mystery and wonder, of fairyland and magic. And it is quite true that it often uses these forms of human experience. But this is not its real quality. From the story of Tristan and the 'lais' of Mary of France, down to the Vita Nuova of Dante, that with which it is occupied is the human heart, its hopes and fears, its joys and sorrows, its exultation and despair. We have only to read the earliest and greatest forms in which the story of Tristan and Iseult have come down to us to see this for ourselves. It is indeed true that we can see or that we can conjecture that behind the present romance there may have lain an epic story of the hero's actions, but what we see now is nothing but the story of the 'infinite passion', the 'infinite pain' of the human heart. It is the story of their fatal love, of the passion which drives them out of the homes of men into the wilderness, the fatal passion which separation only makes deeper, which nothing can change, nothing can end, the story of a man and woman to whom the world is well lost for love. And if you wish to see the whole meaning of life as the romance actually understood it, you have but to turn again to that 'lai' of Mary of France, which tells us in a few lines how Tristan and Iseult, long parted, succeed in meeting in the forest for a few moments--meet and then part--and over it all there is nothing but a certain exquisite sentiment of love and pain, of love and tears.

This romance poetry is indeed strange, so strange that no one has yet succeeded in finding or explaining its real origin. Only the day before, the great artists were singing the gallant deeds of men, but now they can see nothing, think of nothing but the human heart. And what is perhaps strangest of all, this great reality of feeling, of passion, is presented under the form of a world almost wholly unreal and conventional. The men and women of the epic were great heroic figures, of larger stature, of greater passions than the common run, but they were quite real people, moving and acting in the real world. The figures of romance are for the most part, but for the intense reality of their love, the unreal, conventional figures of a world of knights and ladies, of unreal and conventional actions. We understand the epic world, we see and recognize their people, their dwellings, their ways of acting and thinking, but the romantic knights and ladies are mere conventions.

The truth is that the chivalrous or romantic world is unreal, partly perhaps because the artists are occupied with nothing but the emotions, and profound though these are, it is perhaps because of their abstraction that the romance ended in the strange allegorical movement of the thirteenth century. In the hands of the later and lesser poets, the romantic method finally loses almost all sense of personality, and becomes a picture and analysis of abstract emotion. It is to these abstractions that Guillaume de Lorris gave a new life and a singular grace in the personifications of the Romance of the Rose, and the charm and grace of his art carried Europe off its feet, so that for nearly three hundred years it tended to dominate European poetry. Even the greatest artists of these centuries, Dante and Chaucer, at least started with this method, and at the very end of the fifteenth century William Dunbar in Scotland still used it with grace and vivacity.

But I have lingered too long in the Middle Ages. I have done so because, if we could only make more clear to ourselves the homogeneity of the Europe out of which we all came, it would, I think, greatly help to clear up the superstitious exaggeration of the conception of nationality in art. There is not time to deal with it, or we might stay to observe that the characteristic of mediaeval literature is that of all mediaeval art and life. To myself, indeed, it is clear that the notion that the people of the Middle Ages desired or worked for a unified political organization is indeed a great mistake. But, on the other hand, it is equally certain that in general civilization, as in religion, there was a real unity, and that it was only very slowly indeed that the self-conscious nationalities of the modern world were formed out of the welter of the confused races and tribes of Europe: indeed, in some parts of Europe this development was not reached till the nineteenth century and in south-eastern Europe it is only coming to-day.

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European art still transcends nationality; in its essence it is differentiated by the personality of the artist, not by the distinction of nationality. This may seem at first sight a paradox, for you may be inclined to say that surely the modern national literatures are in many ways different, you will say that there is surely some great difference between Dutch and Italian painting, some great contrast between English and French poetry. Many people used to speak, perhaps some do still, of the warm and passionate and romantic south, and of the cold and ungracious and passionless north. But this is merely a delusion. Dante is not more imaginative or passionate than Shakespeare.

What is it then which has produced this impression? The answer to the question and the best evidence of the unity of European art will perhaps be found in examining some of the great movements in its history, since the time when the civilization of the Middle Ages reached its highest point in the thirteenth century.

With the fourteenth century we come to the beginning of a movement which culminated in the greatest literature of the modern world, in the drama of England and Spain. But its beginnings are at first sight strangely different from its fulfilment, and it is almost impossible therefore to find any phrase or term under which we can justly represent it. The first great master of the new world was Dante, but not the Dante of the exquisite sentiment but artificial form of the Vita Nuova, but the great imaginative realist of the Divine Comedy, the artist who could portray the passion and pain of Francesca and her lover, and with equal power the masterful figure of Farinata, whose dauntless soul not hell itself could quell; who could pass from the vivid drama of the fierce contemporary life of Italy to the infinite peace of those to whom 'la sua voluntade è nostra pace'. For indeed it is this which places Dante among the supreme poets of the world, that there is no aspect of the reality of human life and experience which is strange to him, and which the greatness of his imagination cannot make living to us. It has often been said that Dante is the greatest and most representative artist of the Middle Ages, but so far as this is true, and it is only partially true, it may make plain to us that there are no boundaries of time in art any more than of race or country. Dante is the first great artist of a new world, but it was not till three centuries had passed, it was not until Shakespeare, that the whole meaning of the new literature was made clear. The new literature has been thought to begin with two great artists, an Italian and an Englishman: with Boccaccio in the south and Chaucer in the north.

What is, then, the characteristic quality or note of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales? It is not, as some absurd persons think, to be discovered in the licentiousness or grossness of some of these tales, this only represents one aspect of their realism, and indeed in this they do little more than continue the characteristics of what we know as the 'Fabliaux' of the Middle Ages. The quality of the new art lies just in this, that there is nothing in human life which is uninteresting or insignificant to these great artists, that they are bound by no traditions, hampered by no conventions. They had begun as artists of romance, and the romantic sentiment of life never ceased to interest and move them, but they had learned to go beyond the romantic conventions, and to find the material of their art in everything which was part of the reality of life. To them, as to the other tale-writers of these centuries, it was quite immaterial whether they were retelling a story which had come down from immemorial antiquity, or relating something which had happened but yesterday in their own town or village, and they knew nothing of distinctions of class or rank or circumstance; it is the universal human interest which arrests them. The example which we shall find most representative is that which is to us English people the most familiar, that is the 'Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales. Was there ever anything greater of its kind than this? Who can ever forget these figures: the Knight, the Franklyn, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath? As we read there passes before us all the company of human life, wise and foolish, grave and gay, good and bad. Chaucer and Boccaccio are the greatest artists of what has often been called the 'realistic' type, they are at least very easy to distinguish from the epic and romantic artists.

They are great artists, but it is also clear enough that their powers and their insight into human life were limited. What they began was carried out to its fulfilment by the great dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For this is indeed the relation of the tale-writers to the dramatists, that they furnish the materials upon which the dramatists built up their presentation of human life, or rather, the elements which are transformed by the imagination of the great dramatists from bare 'realism' into the highest expression of reality. No doubt the dramatists take into their work other materials and influences, but the substantial quality whether of the tragedy or the comedy is intimately related to that of the tales. How often were the great dramas built up on materials which they drew from Bandello or the other Italians who continued the tradition of Boccaccio, or from similar northern sources. But the great dramatists gave their stories a life, a passion, a breadth and fullness which is far removed from that of their sources. In their hands, or rather in their creative imagination, we see not merely the external circumstance, the bare fact, but we see all the fullness and completeness, all the exquisite grace and beauty, all the passion and terror of human experience. We may call Boccaccio and Chaucer 'realists', but it is only in Marlowe and Webster, and above all in Shakespeare, that we reach reality itself.

We all know the world of Shakespeare, how he ranges from Falstaff to Hamlet, from Bottom to Lear, from Mrs. Quickly and Doll Tearsheet to Rosalind and Imogen and Cordelia; we know how to Shakespeare, and in a lesser degree to some of the other great Elizabethans like Marlowe and Webster, there is nothing common and insignificant in life, nothing which the creative imagination of the artist cannot transform, transmute, from mere dross into pure gold. We say, and we say rightly, that here is the greatest thing that England has brought forth, and we think of it as representing the splendid youth and the first maturity of a great nation.

But now, do we remember and understand that alongside of the English drama there is another drama, not indeed so great as that of Shakespeare, but greater, I think, than that of any other Elizabethan, the drama of Spain, of Lope de Vega and Calderon, a drama of the same character, inspired by the same spirit, living under the power of the same creative imagination, a drama in which the same vivid reality is informed by the same breath of magical romance. In the tragedy of Lope de Vega, in the comedies of Calderon, with all the distinctive individuality of the great artists, and of each great work of art, we have a poetic drama which is in its essential characteristics the same as that of England.

And yet how different were the circumstances of the two nations, Spain was decadent, bankrupt, defeated; England was rising to the supreme heights of its greatness under Elizabeth and Cromwell. At the end of the sixteenth century, Spain had passed its splendid meridian and was falling into the grey obscurity of a clouded evening. It had quickly lost the great place which for a few years it had held in the world, every day brought a new failure, every year a new disaster; the great Armada had perished miserably on the dunes of Flanders and Holland, on the cliffs of Scotland and Ireland; a handful of valiant Dutchmen had defied its power and broken its wealth; the real enemy of Spain, that is France, had gathered itself together after forty years of ruin and misery, and had driven out the Spanish power. Indeed, so great, so overwhelming, was--as we can now see it--the ruin, that Philip II, who to the English imagination has stood for the embodiment of cruel and masterful malignity, has become to the historical student one of the tragic figures in history, a sincere, stupid, bigoted man, vainly striving to hold together the great empire which had been created by Ferdinand and Isabella, by Cortez and Pizarro and Charles V.

England, on the other hand, was rising from obscurity to its place as the mistress of the seas; Englishmen were raiding and plundering the New World, which Spain and Portugal had looked on as their own; England was sending out its sailors and merchants to all the seas, and to all lands, from the frozen north to the Indies.

And again, Spain was possessed by a fierce and passionate love for the old religious order, it was the one country in which devotion to the forms and conceptions of mediaeval religion had proved unshakeable, while England was the representative power of the new religious temper, and was soon to hold almost the foremost place in the new intellectual life of Europe.

And yet the drama of Spain is in all its most essential and intimate characteristics the same as that of England; represents on the one side the same overwhelming sense of the tragic conflicts of life, the same sense of the greatness, the splendour of human nature, which is most triumphant when most it seems to fail; and on the other side at least something of that exquisite, that almost unimaginable grace of the romantic comedy, of the world of Portia and Viola and Beatrice and Miranda. I do not think that the unity of the great art of Europe, the comparative insignificance of merely national characteristics and historical circumstances can find a more convincing illustration.

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I could wish that I were able to deal adequately with the parallel movements of painting and sculpture during these centuries, but I have neither the capacity nor is there now the time to deal with them. This much only may be said, that the movement of these arts is very closely parallel during these centuries, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth, to that of literature. I cannot discuss the characteristics of mediaeval sculpture and painting, but I would remind you that the notion that these were merely conventional and abstract is just as mistaken as the notion that mediaeval literature deals only with conventions or allegories. It is of course obviously true that the ecclesiastical or religious purpose served by the greater part of the decorative art of the Middle Ages which has survived to us, limits and restrains its subjects and its forms. But no one who is at any pains to consider mediaeval sculpture and mosaic painting can fail to see that alongside of much which became conventional, and was fixed in what has been called the 'Byzantine' style, there is an immense amount of work both in sculpture and in mosaic which expresses the determination of the mediaeval artist to represent the world as he experienced and saw it, and that the main obstacle to the free expression of this spirit was not the acquiescence or satisfaction of the mediaeval artist in conventional forms, but the lack of technical dexterity. This will become evident to any one who will turn his attention, in studying the mosaics, from what are no doubt the somewhat conventional and hieratic figures of saints and angels to the realistic attempts to portray the stories of the Bible. And it will be clear to any one who will study, for instance, the sculpture of Wells or Amiens or Chartres that by the thirteenth century the artists were rapidly learning how to represent the world as they knew it, and something of its grace and beauty. If we say that the history of the plastic arts in Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries is the history of the discovery and presentation first of reality, and then of reality as transformed by the highest imaginative conception of beauty, this must not be understood to mean that reality and beauty had been absent from those arts in the Middle Ages.

If then we trace the development of Italian art, we shall first observe in such work as that of Masaccio in the Brancacci chapel at Florence just the same characteristic interest in the appearance and the varieties of human life as we find in the work of Boccaccio and Chaucer, and in the succession of the great Tuscan and Umbrian and Venetian painters and sculptors the same transformation of the bare reality of life by the magic of the imaginative sense of beauty and of passion as in the great drama. It is not, I think, merely fanciful to say that the real counterpart of the English and Spanish drama is to be found in the Italian painters and sculptors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and in the Flemish artists of the early seventeenth. It is certainly true that each of these great artists had his own individual and distinctive genius, but the exquisite grace and beauty of the Umbrians and Tuscans have never been matched save in the romantic comedy of Shakespeare, and the presentation of the tragic passion of the human soul in King Lear has only once been equalled, and that is in the dreadful beauty and horror of the Night and Day, the Evening and the Morning of Michelangelo.

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I do not think I need say much about the classical movement in art and literature, for we all know that it was international. It was begun by Petrarch, not indeed the Petrarch of the sonnets, for these are only a later form of the Troubadour lyric, and do not show any special trace of the classical influence, but the Petrarch whose letters were the first summons of Europe to a new and indefatigable work of the rediscovery of the ancient world. It was an Italian with whom the classical movement began, but it was only in the hands of two northern artists that it achieved a satisfying development in literature: the one a Frenchman, Racine, the other an Englishman, Milton. Neither are, I imagine, really classical at all, but of the two, Milton, as he was by far the more learned in ancient art, was also probably nearer to the ancient world both in form and in spirit.

Nor need I say anything about the deplorable ravages of the movement of good taste and common sense, which produced Boileau and, in some measure, Pope. It did some good, but far more evil, but happily it is long past and dead and done with, and we can afford to remember the little good and to forget the evil. Good or evil, it was at least very clearly a European and not a national movement.

I must ask you now to consider the extraordinary changes which passed over Europe in the eighteenth century, to trace the beginnings of that change which culminated in what we generally call the Romantic movement.

We all know, though not as well as we should, the work of Defoe, and beside Defoe there stands a painter whom also we all know, the great Hogarth. We all at least have read Robinson Crusoe, and we have probably all seen Hogarth's engravings of the good and bad apprentices, and the series of paintings in the National Gallery known as the 'Marriage à la mode'.

What is it now that we find in Defoe and Hogarth? An infinite multitude of detail--we all remember the 'three Dutch cheeses' and the 'fowling-pieces' which Robinson carefully ferried on his raft from the wreck to the island--an unsparing presentation of all the ugly and sordid realities of life; you might almost say, by preference the ugly realities, the squalid vices, the stupid and brutal ferocity of human nature. It is not a pretty or a pleasing world which we see in Hogarth or in Defoe's Colonel Jack. But they are great artists. If you see human nature often on its most repulsive side, in its harshest and most repellent form, at least you see in their novels or pictures, the world as they saw it in the streets and taverns, in the police courts and prisons of their day, as for that matter you can still see it everywhere in town or country. The world which they see may often, perhaps usually, be ugly, but at least there is no conventional prettiness, there is no smug veneer of an artificial good taste which refuses to call a spade a spade, and which deliberately turns away from those things in life which are irritating to its sense of decorum and propriety.

Here there is something new, and we can imagine a defender of the nationalist conception of art saying that here at last we have an obvious example of the revolt of northern realism against the southern or classical grace. But there could not be a greater delusion. For though it is true that the new realism was not fully developed all over Europe until the eighteenth century, it had its beginnings in the sixteenth century, and not in the 'cold' north, but in the 'romantic' south. The first signs of the new movement are to be found not in England or in Flanders, but in Spain in the sixteenth century. It was the Lazarillo de Tormes, the first of the Picaresque novels which struck the new note, which turned from the fantastic and conventional world of the romances in which Don Quixote had nourished his soul, and from the heroic world of beauty and grace of the dramatists, to the bare and hard reality of the life of the beggar and the vagabond. Not even Defoe himself ever surpassed the clearness and precision of the Lazarillo, and it was the first work of a type, whose slow development can be traced in almost every country in Europe: in England, in the realistic attempts of Greene and Nash and Deloney, in Germany in Simplicissimus, in France in the Roman comique of Scarron and in the Gil Blas of Le Sage, who was an almost exact contemporary of Defoe.

And all this can be traced just as clearly in the history of painting. The great Italian painting had ended with the gorgeous magnificence of the Venetian school, with Giorgione and Titian and Tintoretto, and its mastery passed for a few years to Flanders, to Rubens and Vandyck; but in the painting of Spain and of the Low Countries in the later seventeenth century we find ourselves in another world. The little beggar boys of Murillo may perhaps show a somewhat mannered realism, but the Spanish painting, as a whole, while it would be absurd to try to describe it under any one phrase, shows very clearly the determination to present the reality of the world under terms which are very different from those of the great Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And when we turn to the art of the Low Countries in the latter part of the seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries, leaving for the moment out of account the new art of landscape painting, we find ourselves in the same world as that of Defoe and Hogarth.

What was this, then, that had come to European art and literature? Clearly what we see is the transition from the heroic world of the tragedy, from the splendid beauty and force of the Italian painters, from the infinite grace of the romantic comedy, to some other artistic apprehension of the world. The movement was not indeed wholly dependent upon a reaction, but in its development it corresponds with the reaction against the continuance of a great tradition which had become merely a convention, when it had lost its vitality and sincerity. The best examples of this may perhaps be found in Dryden's attempt to carry on the heroic tradition in English tragedy, and in Voltaire's strenuous and meritorious efforts to continue the work of Racine and Corneille. They meant well, and their tragic dramas are not without merit, but it is clear enough that they could not bend the bow of Ulysses. They were great artists, as we can see clearly enough in Absalom and Ahitophel, or in Candide, but their genius lay in other directions. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin' is a great judgement of life, one very wholesome and necessary for all time, but it was not the mood of Othello or of Hamlet.

European art had to come down from the empyrean, and though the descent was great, yet it gained new life by once again touching mother earth.

No doubt, however, the harsh reality of Hogarth and Defoe was not the whole of life, and, by a strange transition, before the middle of the eighteenth century we find the novelists and, though they are less important, the dramatists, turning from the faithful and minute study of the outward appearance and form of things to the study of sensibility and emotion, and the world, which had seemed so hard and unmoved, was dissolved in tears.

We find this a strange and even a ridiculous spectacle, the men who had prided themselves on their common sense and reasonableness, whose literature had sparkled with wit and epigram, blubbering and crying like great children; but whatever we think of it, that is what happened. The first artist of the new type was a Frenchman, Marivaux, and his Vie de Marianne is a study of a young woman who is the embodiment of sensibility and self-consciousness, an amiable and virtuous girl, who is hardly able to enjoy the good that life brings her, for fear lest she should miss the opportunity of renunciation. The first great novel of sentiment is also French, the Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut, and here indeed we are in the deep waters of affliction; there are but few moments between the beginning and the end of his sad story when the hero is not in tears. And yet it is a great novel, for there are few studies of human nature, as absorbed and almost lost in emotion, which are more moving.

These novels, however, which appeared between 1730 and 1740, are overshadowed by the works of the great Englishmen, by Richardson and Sterne and Goldsmith, for these are not artists of England alone, but of all Europe, known and loved and imitated in every country in Europe. The sorrows of Clarissa, the pathetic or maudlin humour of Sterne, the idyllic grace and gentle laughter of Goldsmith, these, as they moved every heart, influenced even the greatest of European artists. The influence of Clarissa on Rousseau, of Goldsmith on Goethe and Jean Paul Richter need no exposition.

The sentimental movement reached almost its highest level in the great and morbid genius of Rousseau, who was himself the living embodiment of the movement. Far more than even his creations, more than Julie or Saint-Preux, was he himself possessed by an emotionalism which finally became a disease. But, strangely enough, it was the Olympic genius of Goethe which gave its supreme form to the treatment of life under the terms of feeling. In Werther this whole phase of art passed beyond itself into the tragedy of the vain and hopeless efforts of an honest but over-sensitive nature to control his emotion and to master his life. Not indeed that it was with Werther the movement ended: it was continued in Byron: it was perhaps the most important element in what the Germans call specifically their Romantische Schule, and in the work of the French Romantic artists from Chateaubriand to Alfred de Musset. If you wish to see it in painting you have only to look at the work of Greuze, and at the engravings in our grandmothers' 'Forget-me-nots'. In spite of all its absurdities this sentimental movement played a great part in preparing men for the great revolution itself, for it opened men's hearts, it set free their emotions; if the realism of Defoe and Hogarth had enabled men to escape from convention and the mannerisms of good taste into a world of reality, the emotional movement gave this reality fullness and content, represented a larger and more intimate apprehension of life.

This brings us to another aspect of the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the poetry and painting of 'nature', to the beginnings of that great artistic movement which culminates in Wordsworth and Turner, and whose influence dominated all Europe in the eighteenth century and continues to do so in our own time. It seems a strange thing, but it is true, that it was not till the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that there appeared a school of painting which took landscape, and a poetry which took 'nature' specifically for its subject. There is indeed frequent reference to 'nature' in the poetry of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century, and this is often significant in the early English poetry and charming in the romances and in Petrarch and Chaucer, while in Dante and the Elizabethans, and especially in Shakespeare, it reaches an almost incomparable beauty; yet in all these it is, as in the backgrounds of the great Tuscan and Umbrian painters, exquisite and significant and true, but not the prime subject which engages their attention.

There are indeed two great poets in whom we begin to feel that the background begins to be almost as important as the figures of the foreground; Spenser is genuinely interested in his stories of chivalry and honour, and in his moral allegory, but we sometimes wonder whether the most important thing in his poetry is not the chequered light and shade of his forests, the picturesque splendour of his castles, and the gloom of his caverns and dungeons. Spenser's poetry is like a tapestry on which indeed some story of human life is presented, but which is in the end a great work of decorative art, to which the immediate subject contributes form and pattern and colour, but in which it is in a measure lost.

In Milton the matter is different: no one can doubt that he is a great artist of human life and fate; even if Paradise Lost were to leave us in some uncertainty, the Samson would convince us all. But, while I think this is true, it is also clear that not only in the grace of his earlier poetry, but in the maturity of his genius, in the Lycidas and even in the Paradise, Milton is at least as great an artist of nature and its beauty as he is of life. And near Milton there stands a poet, lesser indeed, but individual and unique, that is Henry Vaughan, who had unhappily strayed into the 'metaphysical' maze, and who helplessly enough tries to endue himself with the giant armour of Donne, but who, when he is himself, is one of the most exquisite and gracious poets of nature.

We may perhaps, without being fanciful, find a parallel to these poets in the great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, in whose work we see the landscape of Venetia and the Cadore compelling more and more our attention, as not a mere background, but as an integral part of the picture; but it was not till the seventeenth century and the Flemish and Dutch painters that we see the transition complete, and the artist sets before us not some scene in human life, but simply the beauty and splendour of 'nature' herself.

It was not till Thomson began to publish The Seasons in 1726 that the development was complete in poetry. Thomson is a difficult poet to appreciate rightly, for though his subject was 'nature' his method was often as conventional and artificial as that of any Augustan; but he was a lover of the fields and woods, and his imagination, if it is not very powerful, is often very sincere. What was begun by Thomson was carried on with greater sincerity and reality by Cowper, and was transformed by the imagination of Gray and Collins. We sometimes think of this development as specifically English, and it is true that in Wordsworth and Shelley the poetry of nature grew into something which is unique and unmatched, but we must not think of the poetry of Wordsworth as though it were the only form under which nature can be presented. That would be to ignore the qualities, in England of Keats and Tennyson, and in Europe of great artists in whom the treatment of nature assumed other forms. The great poetry of nature began in England, but it was carried on in all the European countries, and for more than a century it was dominated mainly by the genius of Rousseau in France and of Goethe in Germany. I cannot here pretend to deal with the treatment of nature in Rousseau, or with the outcome of his influence first in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand, and then in the elegiac beauty of Lamartine and de Musset's Nuits; nor can I deal with the poetry of nature in Goethe, and its lesser but often beautiful expression in the German 'Romanticists', and in Heine. It is only possible here to remind ourselves that neither the poetry nor the painting of nature belongs to any one country, but is an intimate part of all modern art.

* * * * *

And thus at last we come to the great revolution itself, that great revolution in art and thought and life, of which the political and social revolution is one form, and of which we are all the children. In this, all the elements of which we have been thinking are gathered up and come to perfection; reality, sentiment, nature. And this was of no one country or nationality. The first and also the greatest artist of the revolution is Goethe himself, for it all culminates and reaches its highest expression in Faust. The passion for freedom, for the complete experience of life, for life itself, and not mere knowledge or mere words--this is the motive which drives Faust till he is willing to make his bargain with any power which will give him this. The infinite, the insatiable desire of the human soul, which can never be wholly satisfied, which can never reach its term, this is the passion which possesses Faust, this is the rock upon which the hopes of the poor devil are shipwrecked, the poor devil who in the limitation of the merely critical and negative temper cannot understand that Faust can never be satisfied, will never say to the moment, 'Verweile doch, du bist zu schön.' For the drama of Faust is not a drama of damnation, but of redemption, and though the breadth and scope of the whole conception pass beyond all presentation in complete and rounded form, the great tragedy of Gretchen takes us from the splendid but abstract world of ideas into the simplest experience of human life, where Faust becomes human through love itself, but too slowly, too late to avert the tragedy.

If Goethe represents the great humane conceptions of the revolution most profoundly, Wordsworth comes very near him in the depth of his knowledge of humanity, and in his supreme sense of the unity of all life and nature with the living spirit who is in all things; and the great romantic artists of France are governed by the same sense of nature and love and the spiritual, and in Victor Hugo this reaches a level only just below that of Goethe himself.

* * * * *

You must not misunderstand me, nationality has real meaning, it has something akin, but distantly, to personality; but in the main it affects the more superficial aspects of art. In painting and sculpture the European artists use a language which we can all understand, imagine life and nature under terms which we all feel and know to be true. And, though in literature the language creates a real difference, and causes a difficulty in recognizing the unity which lies behind the difference, yet the moment we begin to overcome that difficulty we find ourselves in a world intelligible, familiar, moving to us all; and intelligible just in proportion to the greatness of the artist.

It is idle for us to dispute about the relative greatness of our national arts, for their greatness lies not in national idiosyncrasies, but in the personality of the artist, and in the single, the unique quality of the particular works of art, and these belong not to this country or nation or to that, but to us all. It is not to Frenchmen only that the intellectual passion of Pascal, or the hatred of shams and the love of the honest man of Molière or of Voltaire, appeal, but to us all. It is not only Germans who understand the splendour of human experience, and the infinite pathos of the mistakes of the human heart, but we all. And the spectacle of the tempest in the heart of Lear, that tempest of the soul, of which the storms of nature are but a faint reflection, or the exquisite serenity and humanity of the recognition of Cordelia, these are not the prerogative possessions of England, but they speak to the heart and soul of the whole world.

We may be divided from each other by many things, material or political, but in the supreme art and poetry we rise above all these distinctions and are only men and women, with the earth under our feet and the heavens above us.

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BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

The subject treated in the essay may be considered in relation to the following works:

Beowulf; The Song of Roland; The Nibelungenlied.

Tristan and Iseult (Thomas, or Béroul); Mary of France, Lais.

Dante, Divina Commedia.

Boccaccio, Decameron; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales.

Shakespeare; Lope de Vega; Calderon.

Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Le Sage, Gil Blas.

Marivaux, Marianne; Prévost, Manon Lescaut.

Richardson, Clarissa; Goethe, Werther.

Goethe, Faust; Wordsworth, Michael, &c..

Victor Hugo, Légende des Siècles.

There are English translations of the greater number of these.

VII

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS UNIFYING FORCES

Some political thinkers have taken the State for the highest form of human association. Humanity is for them a mere abstract idea. It is no organized whole; owns, they think, no common allegiance, pursues no common aim. To find such an organized whole, such an allegiance, such an aim, we must look to the State and to nothing beyond it. We find such a whole in Germany, in France, in England, but not in anything common to the three and to other States as well. This opinion, due in its modern shape to Hegel and his followers, is false to history, false in political theory, and mischievous in ethics, but it is nowhere more false than in relation to the world of thought. The essential unity of Western civilization as an intellectual, moral, and spiritual commonwealth is indeed illustrated--unfortunately illustrated as it happens--by this very theory of the State which denies it. For the theory is of German make. It arose out of the historical conditions of Prussia in the early years of the nineteenth century, was fostered in Germany by the peculiar method by which the unity of the nation was effected, and, setting out from its home, has permeated much of the thought of the West, effectively combating the Liberal humanitarianism which was the especial contribution of England to the movement of the nineteenth century. The reaction of the German idea of the State on the English conception of liberty is the dominating influence of the last forty years in English political thought and progress. There can hardly be a more striking testimony to the reality of that unity which the theorists who embody it seek to depreciate or deny.

When we speak of unity in this connexion we may mean one of three things. There is a unity of character or type. There is the unity involved in continuous unbroken descent from a common origin, and there is unity of effective interconnexion and mutual dependence. These senses of the term unity are confused by some writers, but must clearly be distinguished before any useful inquiry can be made. Unity of character, for example, is a different thing from continuity of historical development, for a civilization might radically change its character in the course of generations. It might lose all the specific features of its own family and come into closer resemblance with others of quite distinct parentage. Again unity of character is not the same thing as the effective interconnexion and co-operation of different centres. On the contrary, such co-operation is of most value where there is marked difference of character, where, for instance, a lack of a quality in one nation is counteracted by a surplus in another. Thus these three forms of unity are distinct, but if distinct they are not unrelated. Naturally, where there is a common origin, many traits of the primitive unity of character are likely to persist, and where there is effective intercommunication, many differences may be rubbed off. So, where we start with unity of origin, we are likely to find some measure of unity in other respects, and this is what we do find, in fact, in the case of Western civilization. It does possess a certain unity of character, and this is largely due to unity of origin, and is maintained in spite of marked divergences, which have not impeded an effective intercommunication but have tended rather to add interest and value to the results which that intercommunication has produced.