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 'Satemvoelker' 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 regime, 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-siecle 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'.[12] It was a criticism of despair, like that of M. Levy-Bruhl: for the Cyclops had the 'will to power'.[13]

Here, then, was a social structure and a political world, an oikoumene 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.[14]

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:

[Footnote 1: This chapter has not had the advantage of Prof. Myres's revision, in view of the rest of the book which he has not seen. Being for some time abroad on war-work, it was impossible to communicate with him; and it is therefore thought best to print his paper just as it was written some months before the lectures were delivered.]

[Footnote 2: Herodotus, viii. 144. After the battle of Salamis, when the Athenians are invited by Xerxes' envoy to desert the Greek cause, they say they cannot betray what 'is of one blood and of one speech, and has establishments of gods in common, and sacrifices, and habits of life of similar mode'.]

[Footnote 3: For details see the section on Herodotus in Anthropology and the Classics; and E.E. Sikes, The Anthropology of the Greeks.]

[Footnote 4: Thucydides i. 6 (Greek: polla d' an kai alla tis apodeixeie, to palaion Hellenikon omoiotropa to nun barbariko diaitomenon).]

[Footnote 5: (Greek: tou gar logon eontos xynon, zoousin oi polloi os idian echoutes phronesin).]

[Footnote 6: (Greek: anthropoisi pasi metesti ginoskein eautous kai sophroneein).]

[Footnote 7: Thucydides, i. 5. He too, as it happens, is illustrating a primitive Old World, round the Aegean shores of Greece, by the contemporary West in the backwoods of Aetolia.]

[Footnote 8: Farrand, The Basis of American History, 1904, p. 270.]

[Footnote 9: The [Greek: balanephagoi andres], 'acorn-eating men', of Greek traditional ethnology.]

[Footnote 10: Bicknell, The Prehistoric Rock Engravings in the Italian Maritime Alps, Bordighera, 1902; Further Explorations, 1903. I begin to suspect that the stippled and shaded enclosures which accompany the drawings of oxen, ploughs, and men with hoes may represent the cultivation plots.]

[Footnote 11: I owe valuable information about the Gipsies to my friend Dr. John Sampson, of the University of Liverpool; but he is in no way responsible for this interpretation of it.]

[Footnote 12: Odyssey ix. 428 (Greek: pelor, athemistia eidos).]

[Footnote 13: Odyssey ix. 214-15:

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

[Footnote 14: Horace, Epode xvi. In his 'better land'—

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

AEre, dehinc ferro duravit saecula; 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.



IV

UNITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES[15]

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.

I

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.'[16] 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 oil, or oc, or si.[17] Of the three branches of this idioma, that of oil, 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.

II

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 trouvere, 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'.