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.'[18] 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.'[19] 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.[20] 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 Troeltsch, 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'.[21] 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.

IV

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 etatisme 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. Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen (II. Kapitel).

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

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 15: I should like to dedicate this essay to my friend and old pupil, the Rev. Bede Jarrett, O.P., to whom I owe much, and to whose book on Mediaeval Socialism I should like to refer my readers.]

[Footnote 16: Pirenne, Revue Historique, liii. p. 82.]

[Footnote 17: De Vulgari Eloquio, 1. viii.]

[Footnote 18: De Monarchia, 1. x.]

[Footnote 19: Cf. Carlyle, Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, ii. 219-22.]

[Footnote 20: Cf. E.R. Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics.]

[Footnote 21: Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen, p. 242.]



V

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.'[22]

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.'[23]

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:

[Footnote 22: Sophocles, Antigone, 449-57 (Jebb's translation).]

[Footnote 23: Herodotus, iii. 38.]



VI

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.

* * * * *

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 e 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.